Web hosting for graphic designers

Commonly available commercial web hosting packages

Few graphic arts professionals or designers will want to, or be technically able to, manage their own web server. So, depending on the number of web sites that you intend to manage, there are a number of different hosting options.

Shared hosting

To run a single website, the cheapest option will be to buy a shared web hosting package.

Shared hosting is where a number of different web sites will be located on a single web server. Each web site will have its own domain name and outside visitors will not know (or care) that the site is not sitting on it's own dedicated web server.

Shared web hosting is the most common method of web hosting and is fine for any site that is not going to receive a huge amount of web traffic, such as a freelance designer's portfolio site, or a small design business web site.

Reseller or multiple domain hosting

For designers who are planning on hosting their client's web sites, a reseller hosting account may be the best option. A reseller web hosting package will give you a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth and will allow you to point a number of domain names at your nameservers. Many webhosts also offer domain name reseller accounts.

The advantage of a reseller hosting account is that it allows the designer a certain amount of freedom as to how much access to give each client to certain services on their web sites, whilst still leaving most of the technical server management and security issues to the webhosting company.

Dedicated servers

Dedicated web servers are where you hire or buy a hardware server, but have it physically located with your web host. This is an ideal solution if you are expecting a high level of traffic, or want to run some very server intensive processes.

Hosting companies often offer a number of different levels of management for dedicated server hosting. This can range from fully managed servers, to packages where the client is required to have a certain level of technical ability.

There are also a number of hybrid hosting solutions, such as virtual private servers, which give some of the advantage of a dedicated hosting package, but are in actual fact a software solution which simulates a dedicated computer.

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