A description of website hosting
The most basic and widely used form of web hosting is the shared web hosting solution. It constitutes a way to host your website without having to be much informed about programming and running a web hosting server. Moreover, it's also the most inexpensive form of site hosting and it's quite affordable for anybody. Nonetheless, what is shared web hosting?
What is shared web hosting?
As the name implies, the shared web site hosting solution is a form of service where lots of users share the reserves of the same web hosting server. This means that all web hosting server elements such as CPU, hard disks, RAM, network interface cards etc. are split among the clients whose accounts are on that same server. This is mostly made feasible by setting up separate accounts for the different customers and appointing specific restrictions and usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are applied in order to hinder the users from interfering with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the hosting server from overloading. Typically, shared web space hosting users do not have complete root access to the server's configuration files, which primarily suggests that they do not have access to anything else on the web server beside their own personal hosting account. The web page hosting features that each account may avail of are fixed by the hosting company that possesses the hosting server and by the respective hosting package. That results in the second essential question:
How are the shared web hosting servers shared among the customers?
Hosting providers that supply shared hosting services typically have different hosting plans. Those plans contain different amounts of website hosting features and specs, which in fact set the limits that a site hosting plan will have. The client may select between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will suit him best. The web site hosting package will then determine what limits the client's account will involve, once set up. The prices and the specs of the website hosting plans are specified by the actual hosting distributor. Based on the politics of the vendor, the shared webspace hosting service can be divided into 2 categories - the free hosting service and the normal shared solution, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" companies as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to declare, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they really are subject to the business tactics of the particular distributor and, of course, the requirements of the specific client.
What is the distinction between the free of charge and the popular shared web site hosting service?
Of course, the primary difference between the free of charge and the paid solution is in the amount of features that they contain. Free web hosting firms are not capable of maintaining a large number of servers, hence, they merely accommodate more clients on a single hosting server by decreasing the quantity of system resources provided by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the hosting servers are kept under surveillance and maintained properly, since the large number of accounts may cause the server to crash over and over again. The majority of the free site hosting providers, though, neglect the quality of the service and therefore, it's very difficult to discover a free web space hosting service that's in fact worth the effort. The top free hosting vendors typically offer free client support even to the free site hosting customers, since they want their sites to expand so that they subsequently upgrade to a paid web hosting account, which includes more web site hosting resources. One such provider, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the biggest and eldest free web hosting vendors worldwide.
At the same time, established shared web hosting corporations like smarthouse, for instance, may afford to keep plenty of web hosting servers and hence, they are able to provide much more powerful web site hosting plans. Of course, that affects the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web space hosting package, however, does not necessarily denote that this solution has a better quality. The most advantageous solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a price that corresponds to the real service which you're getting. The top hosting firms that have been around for quite some time are revealing their price tags and package features in a realistic fashion, so that the client may acquainted with what in fact he is obtaining. In addition, some of these provide a free extra with the web site hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by 100's of free-of-cost design templates that are offered by 'smarthouse'. Such web space hosting suppliers do look after their reputation and this is the reason why if you select them, you can rest certain that you won't get duped into buying a plan that you cannot in fact utilize.
What should I expect from a shared web space hosting service?
The shared hosting service is best for persons who want to host a basic web page, which is going to use a small or medium amount of web traffic every month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared website hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business grows bigger, your web site will become more and more demanding. Hence, you will have to ultimately migrate to a more feature-rich web space hosting service like a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (also known as a virtual private web hosting server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when selecting a web space hosting distributor, you should also consider how they can be of service to you, or else you might end up relocating your domain name manually to a different provider, which can create website troubles and even prolonged downtime for your web page. Hence, picking a site hosting provider like 'smarthouse', which can supply you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow, is crucial and will save you a lot of inconveniences in the long run.