There are several different kinds of Web Hosting that is hosting your web page on one of their servers. What are the different kinds? There are several different kinds of Web Hosting.
Free Web Hosting Service -- A free web hosting service is a service in which it is free. No cost to you. No Money or Credit Cards needed. Most free web services support themselves by attaching advertisements to your page in the form of banners, texts-links and/or pop-ups. The majority of free hosting services assign sub-domain names such as (janedoe.forexample.com) or sub-directory like (www.forexample.com/janedoe) Some disadvantages are that you receive little bandwidth, advertisements, no guarantee of uptime, and doesn't allow some file types.
Shared Web Hosting Service – Shared Web Hosting Service can also be called virtual hosting. This is a situation where there are multiple domains hosted on the same physical server and all share the same IP address or a set of IP addresses.
Reseller Web Hosting – Reseller Web Hosting is a setup that involves you selling hosting as a reseller to your own customers. The Parent Hosting company then receives a portion of the hosting proceeds back to it.
Virtual Dedicated Server – Although there are companies who may call this shared hosting, it's true setup is where there are multiple domains on a series of machines not sharing an IP address, and many times the web master has shell access.
Dedicated Hosting Service – Dedicated hosting is setup for one domain for one and it's own set of IP addresses. This is the most common high-end host.
Managed Hosting Service – Managed Hosting involves a web site hiring a company to manage it's servers and to also manage the day to day routine of doing maintenance of the site like backups of the databases and it's cache files.
Co-location Web Hosting Service – The website owner would purchase a server and rent a spot in the rack location for the server to sit. They would then rent a block of bandwidth and a block of IP addresses to server their web hosting needs. This is often interwoven with Managed Hosting Services at the Co-location Web Hosting Service. This can be often times the most cost effective over a long span of time.
Clustered Hosting – This is the coupe' de gras of hosting. The end all to beat all. The Clustered hosting solution is for monster sites like MSN, Google, Yahoo, etc. In the most extreme cases, a company may opt for this, however it might think at this point to hiring it's own IT department and in house Servers.
Whatever hosting type your site needs, be sure to do a little background check on the company and try to talk to at least 2 of it's current or past customers. Also think about payment options and lastly about your needs.