How Shared Hosting Works

Shared hosting is a service that hosting distributors provide so that you can upload your website to the Internet.

How can people view your site?

When you develop a website and you want other persons to notice it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to render the site visible on the Internet by shared hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why website hosting services exist.

How does shared hosting work?

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

Types of hosting

With the development of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into existence to fulfill the different expectations of website possessors, among them shared website hosting services, private virtual server web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one web hosting server is shared among numerous shared hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and web hosting server hard drive space quotas that they have been allotted. This form of website hosting is usually cheaper - you don't need to buy the whole web server upfront, since it is divided between a lot of hosting customers, and the hosting company can afford to provide much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting services provider handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The weakness of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if a given web site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other websites on that web hosting server, but most web hosts, including us at cHostit, have protection systems at work that hinder that from happening.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most commonly used type of web hosting, the majority of web hosting companies and hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge rivalry on the hosting market, the majority of web hosting distributors strive to offer affordable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your finances. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will get a gift - one cost-free domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a VPS server plan is a suitable solution. virtual private web server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual web server hosting account holders, but the hard disk drive 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 memory on a private virtual web hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private web hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer gets an entire dedicated hosting web server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most flexible of all hosting solutions and offers many configuration possibilities - the dedicated web server hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is an excellent option for a high-traffic business site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will receive complete root access. You will exercise full authority over the web server, which will permit you to implement any configuration modifications that you might need. The weakness of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical competence is needed - unless you employ an IT expert, it will be your duty to manage and configure the dedicated web server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also much more expensive, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other customers.

A web hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just starting to build your website and are seeking a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most sensible choice. If your site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining before the expiration date. Moreover, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still require more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to migrate to a virtual web hosting server or a dedicated web server without needing to switch hosting providers.