Standard Hosting vs Premium Hosting

At certain hosting locations, we have classified our Hosting offering into Standard Hosting and Premium Hosting. It is important to understand that Standard Hosting is not inferior or inappropriate for hosting your website. In fact, the hardware and network infrastructure utilized for both Hosting options are generally identical. Standard Hosting offers the ideal choice for Individuals and Small Businesses to host websites and applications, whereas, Premium Hosting is an excellent choice for Businesses who are serious about their online presence and have high end requirements.

This document explains the entire list of differences between the two categories of Hosting, and allows you to make an informed decision about the type of Hosting you should purchase -

Resource Utilization

All Web Hosting companies generally maintain a certain utilization ratio across their Web Hosting Servers. This can range anywhere between 60-80%. What this means is that a Web Hosting company will create Hosting packages on a server until that server is about 60-80% utilized in terms of Diskspace and/or CPU and/or Bandwidth, after which all newer packages will be created on another server and so on. This ensures that the existing packages on any Web Hosting server have room to grow.

Our Standard Hosting servers also follow the industry-standard utilization ratios. However we maintain a better-than-industry-standard utilization ratio on our Premium Hosting servers. This means that our Premium Hosting Servers are utilized even lesser than our Standard Hosting Servers. This allows a website hosted on a Premium Hosting package comparatively more room for growth.

We also host lesser number of shared websites on our Premium Hosting Servers than our Standard Hosting servers. While this may not make a directly visible impact on a day-to-day basis, it does reduce the risks associated with shared hosting services in general, such as unpredictable/unforeseen spikes in traffic etc.

Resource utilization Predictability

All Standard Hosting packages are configured with excess diskspace, excess email accounts and excess data transfer. This is an industry-standard practice of overselling by averaging utilization. The assumption is that most average Customers will not really utilize the entire data transfer or the entire number of email accounts etc.

Our Standard Hosting packages follow the industry-standard approach and offer excess quantities of every parameter. While our resource utilization and monitoring systems ensure that despite overselling these parameters, the server utilization ratios are maintained, it still reduces predictability and forecasting for Standard Hosting. In Premium Hosting on the other hand, the Customer selects and purchases the exact quantities of each option based on their requirements, thus making it very easy to predict the resource utilization on a Premium Hosting server beforehand. This allows our staff to plan for growth in a slightly better and more scientific manner with Premium Hosting as opposed to Standard Hosting.

Package Configuration Flexibility

• Standard Hosting: Standard Hosting offers you a choice of 3 fixed hosting plans from which you can select the one you wish to purchase. These plans have been created in a manner so as to suffice any standard hosting requirement. Each plan has a certain amount of diskspace, certain number of email accounts and so on.

• Premium Hosting: In Premium Hosting you can either select a plan out of the 3 available pre-configured plans, or custom build your plan from scratch by clicking the Custom build your plan option. When you choose "Custom Build" option you can select the exact quantity of every parameter that your hosting plan consists of. This offers greater flexibility in building a hosting plan to suit your needs.

Advanced Features

Certain advanced features are only available in our Premium Hosting option. These are as follows:

• Ability to Register DLLs (in Windows Hosting)

• Ability to create several (more than 2) SQL Server Databases (in Windows Hosting)

• Ability to allocate email space individually to each email account

• Ability to allocate diskspace individually to each database

• Website Speed Booster (in Linux Hosting)

• Auto Correct URL Spelling (in Linux Hosting)

• Branded File Extensions / Custom MIME types (in Linux Hosting)

• Advanced Web-based Email

In conclusion, both our Standard and Premium Hosting plans offer reliable infrastructure to support your website. However, if you run an ecommerce intensive website, and your web and email presence is important to your Business activities, then, in that case, we recommend that you select our Premium Hosting plans.