Definition of Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is a service that hosting companies offer so that you can put your web site online.

How can people check out your site?

When you develop a web site and you want other persons to discern it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the website available online by shared web 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 web hosting work?

Hosting distributors offer you disk space for your website on their high-end computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet connectivity. When somebody types your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a gaze at the content of your web site.

Types of hosting

With the development of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to satisfy the different requirements of website possessors, among them shared hosting services, Virtual Private Server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one web server is divided between numerous clients who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and server disk space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't need to buy the entire hosting server in advance, since it is divided between plenty of web hosting account holders, and the web hosting provider can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting distributor handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The setback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other hosting users and if one web site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web server, but most web hosting providers, including us at Top Hosting Provider, have security platforms at work that impede that from occurring.

A description of a hosting service

Since shared hosting is the most widely used form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting distributors and hosting customers simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a big rivalry on the hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting firms endeavor to offer modest prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, provide different hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you select the yearly invoicing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a virtual private web hosting server plan is a possible choice. Virtual Private Server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS web hosting customers, but the hard disk is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private web hosting server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Server Web Hosting solution, the customer gets a whole dedicated web hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of configuration options - the dedicated server web hosting users can pick 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 server is a perfect option for a heavy resource-demanding business web site, for instance - you will not share the hosting server's resources with anyone else and will obtain full server root access. You will exert full authority over the physical machine, which will enable you to implement any configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical know-how is needed - unless you engage an IT specialist, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also much more costly, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other users.

A hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just beginning to build your site and are searching for a hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most logical option. If your site grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your data, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular time without having to worry about the number of days remaining until expiration. In addition, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared hosting plan and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to move to a Virtual Private Server hosting solution or a dedicated web server without having to swap hosting providers.