How Web Hosting Services Functions

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

How can people notice your web site?

When you develop a web site and you wish other individuals to visit it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to render the website discoverable 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 web hosting services appeared.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting corporations provide you with disk storage space for your web site on their powerful computers (hosting servers) and guarantee continuous website availability. When someone writes your web address (e.g. 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 glimpse at the content of your website.

Hosting varieties

With the advance of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have emerged to answer the different demands of website owners, among them shared website hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single server is shared among plenty of shared web hosting account holders who are limited by the CPU, traffic and server storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of website hosting is generally less expensive - you don't need to pay for the whole web hosting server upfront, as it is shared between numerous users, and the web hosting distributor can afford to offer much lower prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting services provider handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The downside of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other hosting users and if a given website becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that server, but the majority of web hosting distributors, including us at Small Business Network Administrators, have protection systems at work that prevent that from taking place.

A description of a web hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most common form of web hosting, the majority of hosting companies and web hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge rivalry on the hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting vendors strive to provide affordable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free-of-cost domain registration.

VPS hosting services

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a virtual web server plan is an excellent solution. VPS hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual server web hosting account owners, but the hard disk space is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS web server are not shared. Moreover, 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 proficiency.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer gets an entire physical machine and can use all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers multiple customization possibilities - the clients can pick the hardware and software specifications that will match their requirements. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is a perfect solution for a high resource-swallowing corporate site, for instance - you will not share the hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full root privileges. You will exercise full control over the web hosting server, which will permit you to make any server configuration modifications that you might need. The setback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical expertise is needed - unless you employ an IT expert, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated server. The dedicated hosting solution also costs much more, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just beginning to set up your web site and are looking for a web hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution persists to be the most appropriate option. If your site outgrows your shared website 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, since only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular time without worrying about the time left before the expiration date. Besides, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your site's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to switch to a Virtual Private Server hosting platform or a dedicated web hosting solution without needing to swap web hosting providers.