What Does Shared Hosting Stand for?
Shared hosting is a service that hosting service providers offer so that you can publish your site on the web.
How can people view your web site?
When you build a web site and you want other individuals to see it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the site available online by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why web hosting services exist.
How does shared hosting work?
Hosting corporations provide you with disk drive storage space for your website on their high-powered computers (web servers) and guarantee uninterrupted website accessibility. When someone types your website address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can view the content of your website.
Hosting varieties
With the advancement of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to satisfy the different expectations of website owners, among them shared web hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.
Shared website hosting
Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single server is shared between plenty of shared hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and disk space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of website hosting is normally less expensive - you don't have to pay for the whole hosting server in advance, since it is divided between plenty of web hosting users, and the web hosting provider can afford to provide much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting company takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.
The weakness of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other persons and if a given site becomes really popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at , have protection platforms in place that prevent that from occurring.
A definition of a hosting service
Since shared website hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, most hosting companies and web hosting customers simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a large competition on the website hosting marketplace, most web hosting distributors endeavor to provide reasonable prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your finances. If you pick the annual invoicing cycle, you will get a gift - one free-of-cost domain name registration.
Virtual private servers plans
VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a VPS web hosting server package is an appropriate option. VPS web server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS web hosting account holders, but the hard drive is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual web hosting server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization technology gives you much more freedom to configure your VPS, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical proficiency.
Dedicated Server
With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets an entire dedicated web server and can use all its resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers many configuration options - the dedicated server web hosting users can select the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server is an excellent solution for a high resource-swallowing corporate web site, for instance - you will not share the web server's resources with anyone else and will acquire full server root privileges. You will have full control over the web server, which will allow you to make any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weak side of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical knowledge is required - unless you engage an IT professional, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also much more high-priced, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other clients.
A website hosting advice for beginners
If you are just starting to develop your site and need a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the wisest option. If your website grows beyond your web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your data, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without worrying about the number of days remaining before expiration. Besides, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to move to a virtual private web hosting server or a dedicated web server hosting platform without the need to change hosting providers.