These tips will help newbies get up to speed and remove confusing terminology.

Everything you see and love about the internet resides on a server that a company or individual pays to keep up and running so that you can access it.

Web hosting is said to be the most underappreciated part of the world wide web and yet an essential part of all your online experience like websites, online gaming, Netflix, Facebook, and many more.

Although it’s relatively easy to sign up and use a web hosting provider, it can sometimes be confusing about what hosting type you should use.

Here is what you need to know before opening a web hosting account.

1. The difference between Hosting types

So you have probably seen terms like shared, vps, dedicated, cloud, and reseller. They are just the different hosting types hosting companies offer. They also differ from one another in significant ways.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the cheapest form of web hosting. Nearly every web hosting company offers this. With shared hosting, your website shares a server and server resources with many other sites. If you want to keep your web hosting budget small, and don’t expect much traffic, shared hosting is the way to go. You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for this web hosting type. It is best suited for small businesses.

Since you’re sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors.

VPS

VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting. Larger businesses that expect big traffic to their sites should pick VPS or dedicated hosting, each of which offers increasingly powerful server specs. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you should pay less than $100 per month.

Reseller

If you plan to start your own branded web hosting business without worrying about building the infrastructure from scratch, this will be the best choice.

Cloud hosting

That’s an entirely different beast that lets you easily scale website power across multiple servers, though not every web host offers it.

2. Bandwidth is not the same as Data Transfer

Bandwidth and Data Transfer confuse a lot of people. And they are frequently used interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website serves to visitors, but the terms, technically, do not have the same definitions.

Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be transferred at one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of information that can be used over a given period of time-typically a month.

Think of it like this: a web host may have a maximum of 5GB bandwidth, but depending on your hosting plan, your site may only allow 1GB of data transfers per month.

Note: If your website exceeds its allotted monthly data transfers due to a Reddit hit, for instance, a web host may slow your site’s data transfer speeds or charge you a fee as a penalty. It may even prompt you to upgrade to a higher web hosting tier. It’s good to know your site’s data limitations before you run into situations like this.

3 Unlimited isn’t totally unlimited

Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting plans by tempting you with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. It’s generally not a completely honest deal. Now, I won’t say that these web hosts are straight-up lying, but the “unlimited” storage or data transfers boasts nearly always have limitations that vary by company.

Unlimited storage and data transfers are typically associated with shared or WordPress plans, and they let you run wild…within limits. If your blog gets a steady stream of reasonable traffic (whatever that may mean!), you’ll be in good standing. However, you shouldn’t expect to upload or stream 50TB of data per day. The average user who isn’t doing that is likely dabbling in some questionable activities.

You should consult a web host’s terms of service, or a customer service representative, to learn exactly what you can and cannot do within the scope of your plan’s unlimited offering.

4 The Solid-State Drive/Hard Disk Drive Trade-off

If you’re looking to sign up for shared web hosting, you’ll likely receive real estate on a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) server. The advantage of an HDD-based server is that it can offer large storage amounts on the cheap. As you move up the hosting ladder to more powerful offerings, such as VPS and dedicated, web hosts will give you the option to build a site on a solid-state drive (SSD).

SSD-based servers are lightning-fast storage units. SSD technology is still pretty pricey, so your SSD-based servers typically carry much smaller storage totals than HDDs. You’ll rarely see 1TB SSD servers, which is a number that’s commonplace in the HDD arena.

5 A Linux Server Will Do…Most of the Time

Nearly every web host offers Linux as the operating system that powers their servers. In fact, I don’t think I’ve reviewed a web host that lacked the free, open-source OS. Even if you aren’t familiar with Linux, you don’t need to do any special work on the back end to build a website. Website builders make building sites a breeze.

That said, if your site needs the ASP or ASP.NET scripting frameworks, you’ll need to run with the Windows Server operating system. That’s because the script your write and webpages your produce will only function in a Windows-based environment.

There’s an additional benefit: Microsoft apps, such as Office or Outlook, integrate with the server with ease. The downside? Windows servers are incompatible with Linux-based, open-source software unless you do some tinkering.

Windows servers cost approximately $10 to $20 more than their Linux equivalents, but if you need Microsoft’s tools it’s a small premium.