Web Hosting Services Explained

Web hosting is a service that web hosting corporations offer so that you can publish your web site on the World Wide Web.

How can people visit your web site?

When you develop a site and you want other people to discern it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to render the site available on the World Wide Web by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting providers provide you with hard drive space for your website on their high-end computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee constant service uptime. When somebody types your URL (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a glance at the content of your web site.

Web hosting types

With the growth of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to fulfill the different requirements of website owners, including shared website hosting services, VPS server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is divided between many shared web hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of hosting is typically cheaper - you don't have to pay for the entire web server in advance, since it is shared among numerous hosting account holders, and the hosting services provider can afford to offer much more moderate prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting solutions provider handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if a given web site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other web sites on that web server, but most web hosting firms, including us at resellvps, have protection platforms at work that hinder that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting vendors and hosting clients simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a great competition on the website hosting marketplace, most web hosts strive to provide low prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one free domain name registration.

VPS hosting services

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a private virtual web server hosting package is an appropriate choice. VPS web server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual server hosting customers, but the hard disk drive is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user gets an entire dedicated web hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers loads of customization options - the dedicated hosting users can pick the hardware and software specifications that will match their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated hosting web server is an excellent solution for a intense-traffic corporate site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated web server's system resources with anyone else and will be granted full server root privileges. You will have complete authority over the web hosting server, which will enable you to make any server configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical proficiency is needed - unless you hire an IT pro, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the server. The dedicated web server hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your site and are looking for a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most appropriate option. If your website grows beyond your hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your website files, because only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any particular moment without having to worry about the time left until the expiration date. Also, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to switch to a VPS web server hosting platform or a dedicated server web hosting solution without the need to swap web hosting providers.