Shared Web Hosting Uncovered
Shared web hosting is a service that hosting vendors offer so that you can upload your site to the web.
How can people visit your website?
When you set up a website and you want other persons to spot it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to render the web site visible on the web by shared web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why web hosting services came into being.
How does shared web hosting work?
Hosting service providers offer you content storage space for your website on their high-power computers (servers) and ensure constant Internet connectivity. When somebody writes your web site address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a look at the content of your site.
Web hosting varieties
With the development of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to satisfy the different requirements of website proprietors, including shared website hosting services, private virtual web server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.
Shared hosting
Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one web server is divided among many shared web hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web server storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of web hosting is typically cheaper - you don't need to buy the whole hosting server in advance, since it is divided among a lot of customers, and the web hosting vendor can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.
The negative side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other web hosting users and if a given web site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that hosting server, but most web hosting distributors, including us at , have security platforms in place that hinder that from taking place.
A description of a website hosting service
Since shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, most web hosting suppliers and hosting customers simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a big competition on the website hosting market, most hosting firms strive to offer cheap prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for example, offer different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your budget. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free domain registration.
VPS web hosting
VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. If your site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared web hosting account, a VPS web server is a possible choice. virtual web server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server hosting account holders, but the physical server is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual hosting server are not shared. Also, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your VPS web server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical know-how.
Dedicated Server Web Hosting
With the Dedicated Server Web Hosting solution, the customer gets a whole server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers a multitude of customization options - the clients can select the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting package is a perfect option for a high resource-absorbing business website, for example - you will not share the dedicated web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will receive full server root privileges. You will exercise complete control over the web server, which will allow you to implement any configuration modifications that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated hosting solution is that a higher level of technical expertise is needed - unless you employ an IT expert, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the physical server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also far more costly, because the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other users.
A website hosting tip for beginner users
If you are just beginning to set up your website and are seeking a web hosting solution to start with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most logical choice. If your site grows beyond your web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the remaining time until expiration. Also, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it signifies that your site's popularity has risen!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a virtual hosting server or a dedicated hosting web server without the need to change web hosting service providers.