How Does Hosting Operate?

Hosting is a service that web hosting providers provide so that you can publish your web site on the web.

How can people access your web site?

When you make a website and you would like other persons to notice it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to render the website discoverable on the Internet by hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting corporations offer you disk drive space for your web site on their high-power computers (hosting servers) and ensure uninterrupted Internet access. When someone types your web address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can have a gaze at the content of your site.

Types of web hosting

With the growth of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to match the various demands of website proprietors, including shared web hosting services, private virtual server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one web server is shared between plenty of shared web hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web server hard drive space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't need to pay for the entire hosting server upfront, as it is shared between numerous hosting account owners, and the web hosting distributor can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting vendor handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The weak side of the shared hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other persons and if a given web site becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other websites on that server, but most web hosting suppliers, including us at Cheap Hosted, have protection systems in place that impede that from taking place.

A definition of a hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, the majority of hosting firms and web hosting clients simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the website hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting companies try to provide affordable prices and gifts with their services. We, for example, provide different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one free domain name registration.

VPS services

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a Virtual Private Server web hosting plan is a good choice. private virtual server web hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server 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 an actual dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. Also, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your virtual web hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user obtains a whole physical machine and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most robust of all hosting solutions and offers countless customization possibilities - the dedicated hosting clients can select the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server is an excellent option for a heavy resource-consuming business web site, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will obtain root access. You will have full authority over the physical server, which will allow you to implement any server configuration changes that you might need. The setback of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is needed - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just starting to develop your site and are seeking a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution remains the most relevant choice. If your website outgrows your web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your web site files, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given moment without having to worry about the time remaining before the expiration date. Besides, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to move to a virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated web server hosting platform without needing to change hosting providers.