What Exactly is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting suppliers offer so that you can upload your website online.

How can people check out your website?

When you make a web site and you want other people to spot it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to make the web site reachable on the Internet by shared hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why web hosting services came into existence.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting vendors offer you hard disk space for your website on their high-powered computers (web servers) and ensure continuous website accessibility. When somebody writes your domain (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a peek at the content of your web site.

Types of hosting

With the advance of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to satisfy the various needs of web site possessors, among them shared hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web server is shared between many clients who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web server disk drive storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of web hosting is usually less expensive - you don't need to buy the whole hosting server in advance, as it is shared between lots of hosting clients, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much more moderate prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting vendor handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The drawback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other web hosting account holders and if a given site becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that server, but most web hosting vendors, including us at Hume and Services, have security systems in place that prevent that from taking place.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, the majority of hosting service providers and web hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosts try to provide cheap prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one free domain name registration.

Virtual private servers

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a VPS server package is an appropriate option. VPS web hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other Virtual Private Server hosting clients, but the disk drive is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual private hosting server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization technology gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual hosting server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains an entire web server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers plenty of customization possibilities - the dedicated web hosting customers 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 hosting plan is a perfect choice for a frequently visited corporate website, for example - you will not share the dedicated web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will gain complete server root access. You will have full authority over the server, which will enable you to implement any configuration changes that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical knowledge is required - unless you hire an IT pro, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated web server. The dedicated web hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the physical server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just beginning to develop your website and are seeking a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most reasonable option. If your website outgrows your web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your files, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular time without worrying about the time left before expiration. Also, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a virtual private web hosting server or a dedicated server hosting platform without the need to change hosting providers.