What Does Web Hosting Represent?

Web hosting is a service that hosting distributors provide so that you can put your web site online.

How can people open your web site?

When you set up a website and you wish other individuals to visit it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the website available on the Internet by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting service providers offer you storage space for your website on their high-powered computers (web servers) and ensure uninterrupted website availability. When someone types your web site address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your web site.

Web hosting types

With the development of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to match the various expectations of web site owners, among them shared hosting services, private virtual server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single web hosting server is shared between multiple hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and web hosting server disk drive storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of web hosting is generally less expensive - you don't have to pay for the whole server in advance, since it is shared among a lot of users, and the hosting distributor can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting services provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other hosting account owners and if one website becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web server, but the majority of web hosting suppliers, including us at Hepsia, have security systems at work that obstruct that from happening.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, the majority of hosting service providers and hosting customers simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the web hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting service providers try to provide affordable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your resources. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one charge-free domain registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a VPS hosting server package is an appropriate option. VPS server web hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server web hosting customers, but the physical machine is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated web server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual web hosting server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your server, but it also calls for a higher degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire hosting server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of customization options - the dedicated server hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specs that will meet their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is a perfect solution for a high resource-swallowing business portal, for instance - you will not share the physical machine's system resources with anyone else and will obtain complete server root access. You will have complete authority over the server, which will enable you to implement any configuration changes that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical knowledge is required - unless you hire an Information Technology expert, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the physical server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other clients.

A website hosting advice for beginners

If you are just beginning to build your web site and are seeking a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution remains the wisest choice. If your web site outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the time remaining before the expiration date. Furthermore, if you finally reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still require more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your site's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to move to a VPS web server hosting solution or a dedicated web hosting server without needing to change web hosting service providers.