Definition of Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a service that hosting vendors offer so that you can publish your site on the World Wide Web.
How can people see your site?
When you create a web site and you want other persons to notice it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the website discoverable on the World Wide Web by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why website hosting services appeared.
How does shared hosting work?
Hosting service providers offer you hard disk storage space for your website on their high-power computers (servers) and ensure constant network connectivity. When someone writes your domain name (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can have a look at the content of your web site.
Types of hosting
With the development of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to meet the different needs of website possessors, among them shared website hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.
Shared hosting
Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is divided between numerous web hosting users who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web server hard disk space quotas that they have been allotted. This type of web hosting is typically cheaper - you don't need to purchase the entire server upfront, as it is shared between multiple web hosting clients, and the hosting services provider can afford to offer much cheaper prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting distributor handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.
The downside of the shared hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other web hosting clients and if a given website becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other websites on that server, but the majority of web hosts, including us at , have protection systems at work that prevent that from occurring.
A definition of a website hosting service
Because shared hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, most hosting providers and web hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an extensive competition on the hosting market, most web hosting companies try to offer affordable prices and gifts with their services. We, for example, provide different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your budget. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will get a gift - one charge-free domain registration.
Virtual private servers
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a VPS web hosting server is a possible solution. Virtual Private Server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS hosting account owners, but the physical server is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web hosting server are not shared. Also, the virtualization technology offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical know-how.
Dedicated Server
With the Dedicated Server solution, the user gets an entire hosting server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most robust of all hosting solutions and offers countless customization options - the dedicated web server hosting clients can pick the hardware and software specs that will answer their demands. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting plan is a perfect option for a heavy-content corporate web portal, for instance - you will not share the physical machine's system resources with anyone else and will obtain full root privileges. You will exercise full control over the physical server, which will allow you to implement any configuration modifications that you might need. The weakness of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical knowledge is required - unless you employ an IT expert, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared among any other clients.
A website hosting recommendation for beginner users
If you are just beginning to develop your web site and are seeking a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most logical option. If your site outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not necessitate migration of your website files, since only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular time without worrying about the number of days left until expiration. Moreover, if you finally reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your web site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to move to a private virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting platform without needing to change web hosting providers.