Shared Hosting Explanation
Shared hosting is a service that companies offer so that you can get your web site online.
How can people discover your website?
When you develop a site and you want other people to visit it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to make the website available on the web by shared hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why hosting services came into existence.
How does shared hosting work?
Hosting vendors offer you hard drive storage space for your site on their powerful computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee continuous network uptime. When someone types your website address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a glance at the content of your web site.
Web hosting types
With the progress of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to answer the various expectations of website proprietors, among them shared hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.
Shared hosting
Shared website hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one server is divided between numerous shared hosting account holders who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and web server disk drive space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of website hosting is typically less expensive - you don't have to purchase the whole server upfront, since it is shared between a lot of customers, and the web hosting services provider can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting provider handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.
The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other web hosting account holders and if a given website becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web server, but most web hosting suppliers, including us at , have protection platforms at work that impede that from taking place.
A description of a website hosting service
Because shared website hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of hosting service providers and web hosting clients simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense rivalry on the website hosting market, most web hosting distributors strive to provide affordable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your funds. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free-of-cost domain name registration.
VPS hosting
VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a virtual web hosting server package is an appropriate option. VPS web hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual server web hosting clients, but the hard disk is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS web server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical competence.
Dedicated Hosting
With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the client obtains an entire physical machine and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers numerous customization options - the users can select the hardware and software specifications that will meet their needs. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting package is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-demanding business web site, for instance - you will not share the web server's system resources with anyone else and will be given full server root privileges. You will have complete authority over the machine, which will enable you to make any configuration changes that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical proficiency is needed - unless you hire an Information Technology pro, it will be your responsibility to administer and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also much more costly, since the cost of the physical server isn't shared between any other customers.
A website hosting advice for novices
If you are just beginning to create your web site and are seeking a hosting solution to start with, the shared hosting solution remains the most reasonable choice. If your website outgrows your shared web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any particular moment without worrying about the number of days remaining until expiration. Additionally, if you finally reach the most advanced shared web hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to move to a private virtual web hosting server or a dedicated web server hosting solution without having to swap web hosting service providers.