Shared Web Hosting Revealed

Shared web hosting is a service that web hosting distributors provide so that you can put your site online.

How can people open your site?

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

How does shared web hosting work?

Hosting corporations offer you hard drive space for your site on their high-powered computers (hosting servers) and guarantee continuous network uptime. When someone writes your domain (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a glance at the content of your web site.

Web hosting varieties

With the progress of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various requirements of web site possessors, among them shared website hosting services, Virtual Private Server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web server is divided among many web hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and data storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is generally cheaper - you don't need to purchase the whole web server upfront, since it is shared between plenty of hosting clients, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to provide much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting services provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other hosting account holders and if one website becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that web server, but most web hosting service providers, including us at HostFlex, have security platforms at work that obstruct that from happening.

A definition of a hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, most hosting providers and hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a considerable rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosting firms strive to offer modest prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you pick the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one charge-free domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a VPS server hosting package is a possible option. Virtual Private Server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS web hosting users, but the hard disk drive is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your Virtual Private Server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Server Web Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire dedicated hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most reliable of all hosting solutions and offers a myriad of configuration options - the dedicated web server hosting customers can select the hardware and software specs that will match their demands. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is a perfect solution for a high resource-requiring business web site, for instance - you will not share the hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with full root access. You will exert complete authority over the hosting server, which will enable you to make any configuration changes that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is required - unless you employ an IT professional, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated hosting solution is also much more costly, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other users.

A hosting advice for novices

If you are just starting to build your website and are seeking a web hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most reasonable option. If your web site outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more advanced one at any particular time without worrying about the time left before expiration. In addition, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to move to a VPS server hosting solution or a dedicated server without having to swap hosting providers.