How Does Shared Hosting Work?

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting service providers offer so that you can publish your site on the Internet.

How can people discover your website?

When you develop a site and you wish other persons to observe it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the site visible online by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why web hosting services exist.

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting corporations provide you with hard drive storage space for your website on their high-power computers (web servers) and ensure constant service uptime. When someone writes your domain name (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 look at the content of your web site.

Types of web hosting

With the growth of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the various demands of web site proprietors, among them shared web hosting services, Virtual Private Server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one web server is divided among numerous hosting clients who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and server hard disk space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of web hosting is typically less expensive - you don't have to purchase the whole web hosting server in advance, as it is divided among many hosting account holders, and the hosting company can afford to offer much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting services provider handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The drawback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other clients and if one site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting firms, including us at PC Helper, have security platforms in place that hinder that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, most web hosting suppliers and web hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a great competition on the hosting marketplace, most hosting service providers strive to provide affordable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you select the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a gift - one free domain name registration.

Virtual private servers packages

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a VPS hosting plan is an appropriate solution. virtual web server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS web server hosting account owners, but the server is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a Virtual Private Server are not shared. Also, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual web hosting server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client obtains a whole web hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most reliable of all web hosting solutions and offers tons of configuration options - the dedicated web hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their requirements. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is a perfect choice for a high resource-demanding corporate portal, for example - you will not share the hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be given root privileges. You will exercise complete authority over the physical machine, which will permit you to implement any configuration changes that you might need. The weakness of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical know-how is required - unless you hire an IT expert, it will be your duty to administer and configure the dedicated server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also much more expensive, because the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other clients.

A hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just beginning to develop your website and are searching for a web hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution persists to be the most relevant choice. If your site outgrows your hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your website files, since only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular time without worrying about the time left before the expiration date. Furthermore, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS web hosting solution or a dedicated hosting platform without the need to change hosting service providers.