Web hosting is an online service and space that lets you publish your website on the internet for your website to go live and be accessible to anyone with an internet connection through a web browser.
The files that constitute your website (e.g., codes, images, texts, videos) are stored within a physical server and available for viewing online. The physical server that hosts your website is also a physical computer that operates continuously for your website to be always available to visitors.
Here are the differences in hosting available in the market:
Shared hosting: You share one server with multiple website owners; A shared server will host hundreds or thousands of websites. Everyone shares the same server resources, such as RAM, CPU, storage, and bandwidth.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting: It allocates website owners a set amount of resources 100% of their own. A step up once a website has outgrown shared hosting.
Dedicated hosting: Ideal for large businesses with high levels of website traffic, dedicated hosting is where a website owner exclusively rents the space of an entire server, gaining complete control over the environment.
Cloud hosting: Also known as a hybrid version of a VPS, it is a hosting where several servers work together to host a set of websites. If one of the servers is compromised, the other servers will take over, thus reducing any downtime.
WordPress hosting: Tailored to WordPress users, optimized for WordPress websites. WordPress hosting often includes free licenses for premium plugins and pre-installed themes. You can host a WordPress website on all the other types of hosting, but WordPress hosting can only host WordPress websites.
Email hosting: An exclusive service that operates emails on your domain. Unlike free email accounts such as Gmail and Yahoo, email hosting provides additional features like secure authentication, rerouting and replicating your emails, managing user domain names, and more. In short, email hosting refers solely to storing email data.