What Indeed is Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting firms provide so that you can upload your web site to the Internet.

How can people find your site?

When you make a site and you would like other persons to see it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to render the site discoverable on the web by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting providers provide you with disk drive storage space for your site on their high-powered computers (servers) and guarantee uninterrupted website availability. When somebody writes your URL (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a look at the content of your website.

Web hosting types

With the advancement of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to satisfy the various requirements of website possessors, among them shared website hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web server is divided among lots of customers who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and web hosting server hard disk space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of hosting is usually cheaper - you don't have to buy the whole web hosting server upfront, since it is divided among lots of users, and the hosting supplier can afford to provide much lower prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting services provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The weakness of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if a given website becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that web server, but most hosting companies, including us at The Whole Internet, have protection systems at work that prevent that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most web hosting vendors and web hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the website hosting marketplace, most web hosting distributors endeavor to offer modest prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your resources. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one charge-free domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a virtual server is a good option. private virtual server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual web server hosting clients, but the server is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS hosting server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user gets an entire physical server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers numerous configuration options - the users can select the hardware and software specifications that will meet their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting plan is an excellent solution for a high-traffic corporate web portal, for instance - you will not share the web server's resources with anyone else and will gain root-level access. You will have complete authority over the physical machine, which will enable you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weak side of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical knowledge is required - unless you employ an IT pro, it will be your duty to administer and configure the server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more high-priced, since the cost of the server isn't shared among any other users.

A hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just starting to develop your web site and are seeking a hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent option. If your site grows beyond your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without worrying about the number of days remaining before expiration. Also, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to move to a VPS hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting platform without needing to swap web hosting service providers.