The basic principle of Web hosting, is simple; it’s a place where your web pages reside that’s accessible over the internet.
Do you need it? In short, yes, if you’d like your website to be accessed globally and reliably.
Small Website or high traffic website, what’s the best option?
The most common is shared hosting. This is where your website and email is hosted among often several hundred other websites on the same physical machine (server).
This is by far the most cost effective, and suits most small websites.
What is a Virtual Private Server (VPS)?
This is one very large server that is split in to several smaller “Virtual” Servers. This gives you full access to the “virtual” server computer, so you can install any specific software you need, and gives all the benefits of having your very own server.
Performance is often far superior to that of Shared Hosting, and cost is more than Shared Hosting.