An explanation of website hosting

The most fundamental and popularly availed of variety of web hosting is the shared web hosting solution. It constitutes a means to host your website without having to be much informed about programming and operating a hosting server. In addition to this, it's also the most inexpensive form of web space hosting and it's quite affordable for everybody. Nevertheless, what is shared web site hosting?

What is shared website hosting?

As the name signifies, the shared web hosting service is a type of service where a lot of users share the reserves of one and the same hosting server. This indicates that all web hosting server constituents such as CPU, hard disks, RAM, network cards etc. are allocated among the customers whose accounts are on that same hosting server. This is mostly made feasible by setting up separate accounts for the different clients and applying some limits and quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are imposed so as to prevent the users from interfering with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the hosting server from overloading. Normally, shared hosting customers do not have root-level access to the server's config files, which essentially signifies that they cannot access anything else on the hosting server aside from their very own shared hosting account. The web site hosting features that each account may resort to are determined by the hosting corporation that owns the hosting server and by the given site hosting package. That brings on the second important question:

How are the shared hosting web servers shared among the clients?

Hosting corporations that supply shared webspace hosting solutions normally have various site hosting plans. Those plans contain diverse quotas of web space hosting features and specifications, which actually define the restrictions that a web hosting plan will have. The customer may select between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will befit him best. The webspace hosting package will then determine what restrictions the user's account will involve, once created. The prices and the features of the website hosting packages are defined by the particular web hosting vendor. Depending on the politics of the company, the shared web hosting service can be divided into two groups - the free hosting service and the popular shared service, most recently very famous among "cPanel hosting" corporations as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to declare, which one is better, since they are quite different from each other and they actually are determined by the marketing policy of the specific vendor and, of course, the demands of the specific user.

What is the difference between the free and the standard shared hosting service?

Of course, the essential difference between the free of cost and the paid solution is in the quantity of features that they include. Free website hosting vendors are not capable of keeping a large number of servers, therefore, they plainly host more customers on one single server by reducing the quantity of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only on condition that the hosting servers are kept under surveillance and handled properly, because the immense number of accounts may cause the server to crash again and again. The majority of the free website hosting companies, however, overlook the quality of the service and as a result, it's very tough to come across a free of cost web site hosting solution that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting corporations usually offer free technical support even to the free web space hosting clients, since they want their sites to grow bigger so that they eventually upgrade to a paid web site hosting package, which includes more site hosting features. Such company, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the biggest and oldest free web hosting corporations worldwide.

At the same time, established shared web hosting companies such as YourSiteService.com, for instance, are able to maintain numerous web servers and hence, they are able to provide much more powerful hosting plans. Of course, that affects the pricing of the website hosting plans. Paying a higher price for a webspace hosting plan, however, does not automatically mean that this solution has a finer quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which involve a price that corresponds to the actual service which you're getting. The top webspace hosting suppliers that have been around for quite a while are exhibiting their price tags and plan configurations in a realistic manner, so that the customer may familiar with what indeed he is obtaining. Also, some of these provide a free bonus with the website hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of gratis web design layouts that are provided by 'YourSiteService.com'. Such web hosting vendors do look after their good name and that's why if you pick them, you can rest certain that you won't get fooled into purchasing a plan that you cannot in fact utilize.

What should I expect from a shared web site hosting service?

The shared web hosting solution is best for persons who want to host a standard web portal, which is going to devour a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot anticipate, though, that a shared webspace hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business expands, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. Hence, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich website hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (a.k.a. a private virtual server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when selecting a web site hosting supplier, you should also reflect about how they can be of service to you, otherwise you might end up migrating your domain name manually to a separate company, which can cause web site problems and even continuous downtime for your web page. Therefore, going with a web space hosting vendor such as 'YourSiteService.com', which can supply you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is vital and will spare you lots of annoyances in the long run.