Hosting Explanation

Hosting is a service that hosting firms offer so that you can upload your website to the Internet.

How can people access your web site?

When you build a website and you would like other individuals to discern it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to render the website available on the web by hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why hosting services came into being.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting vendors offer you disk drive storage space for your site on their high-power computers (hosting servers) and guarantee constant network uptime. When someone types your domain name (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a glance at the content of your site.

Hosting types

With the advancement of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to fulfill the various expectations of web site possessors, including shared website hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one hosting server is shared between multiple clients who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of website hosting is generally cheaper - you don't need to purchase the whole server upfront, since it is shared among plenty of hosting users, and the web hosting company can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting company handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The downside of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other clients and if one site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that hosting server, but the majority of web hosting service providers, including us at Cheap Hosted, have security platforms in place that hinder that from happening.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most web hosting distributors and web hosting clients simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the hosting marketplace, the majority of hosting suppliers try to offer reasonable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, provide different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your finances. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will get a gift - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS services

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting account, a VPS hosting package is a suitable option. virtual private web server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual web server hosting users, but the hard drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web hosting server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your Virtual Private Server, but it also calls for a more advanced level of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains an entire server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most powerful of all web hosting solutions and offers lots of customization options - the dedicated web server hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server is a perfect option for a popular corporate web portal, for example - you will not share the physical server's resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with full server root access. You will exercise complete authority over the hosting server, which will allow you to make any server configuration modifications that you might require. The downside of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is needed - unless you engage an IT expert, it will be your duty to administer and configure the physical server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also far more expensive, because the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting tip for novices

If you are just starting to create your web site and are searching for a web hosting solution to start out with, the shared web hosting solution remains the wisest choice. If your website grows beyond your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your data, since only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given time without having to worry about the time left before expiration. In addition, if you finally reach the most powerful shared web hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to switch to a VPS server or a dedicated web server hosting solution without having to switch hosting service providers.