When you start searching for hosting solutions, you can be overwhelmed with terms such as VPS, Dedicated, Shared, Managed, Unlimited, Transfer Rate, and much more.

The goal here is to try to help you understand what solution will best fit your specific needs.

Let’s look at the most basic detail. Are you hosting a website, blog, photo gallery? Or, are you hosting an elaborate dating service site, or gaming site?

This is where the fundamental decision begins. Websites have become much more content and feature rich over the years. Streaming video, links to twitter, facebook and other social networking sites have all become a standard today on corporate or personal websites. Image galleries and blogs are simply and extension to your main web content.

The majority of users who are putting up a web presence for a fan club, organization or person website, will be able to utilize a shared hosting service. This service allows you to have a graphical interface (such as Cpanel), to navigate through the administration of your site. Video templates and drag and drop functionality allows a novice user to simply upload, download, edit and erase files.

HostMDS provides you even with templates for building websites, that are very simple to customize, yet very powerful. RV Site Builder is a perfect example of what tools are available on a shared hosting service with HostMDS.

Even in shared hosting environments, data base driven queries are a walk in the park. MySQL is built into the shared hosting environment, and table links are very simple.

When you begin to look at more comprehensive web content sites, such as mid-sized e-commerce sites, or higher volume websites with a large amount of data being shared, this is when Dedicated, Managed or VPS solutions come into play.

A Dedicated Server is simply a server that has an operating system on it, that resides within our secured facility. A Dedicated Server is geared for the expert level client. This client has full knowledge on how to operate, configure and monitor a server. There are no applications installed on this server that will allow a novice user to share their web content out of the box.
If you think you want to dive in and try a dedicated server, look at some of the Dedicated Servers for $7.99/mo to see what it's all about.

Managed Servers are similar to dedicated, but now add a layer of manageability from the Network Operations Center at HostMDS. The server is monitored, and maintained by HostMDS for you specific needs. An example would be; XYZ Company has a large customer base that uploads graphic images to the site as a photo studio. XYZ Company cannot use shared hosting, because there are about 200 large files that are uploaded daily.

For this reason, they selected a Managed Server because they do not know how to operate a server, but they need the dedicated resources to run their website.
If XYZ Company had an internal IT staff, or someone who was very familiar with operating a server, they could have chosen a Dedicated Server instead of a Managed Server.

Now, what are VPS Servers? VPS Instances?.
Image you take a Managed Server, and install software that basically allows HostMDS to slice up the resources within that server and allocate those slices to specific clients. A VPS is basically 1 of those slices within 1 physical server. Depending on the size of the server, x amount of slices can be offered. The nice feature about VPS is that if your slice can easily be upgraded if you require more RAM or more processing power. It is a simple variable that
HostMDS needs to adjust. The downside to VPS is that many client share 1 server. Even though HostMDS utilizes all its resources possible to not oversell / over utilize a server, in some instances it occurs unknowingly. For those clients that demand the upmost performance and upmost reliability, Dedicated or Managed Servers are the way to go.

Hopefully this will have helped you clear up some of the terms utilized in the Hosting industry.

Paul.