Shared Web Hosting Explained

Shared web hosting is a service that hosting firms provide so that you can upload your web site online.

How can people visit your site?

When you develop a web site and you wish other individuals to spot it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to render the website reachable on the web by shared web hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why web hosting services appeared.

How does shared web hosting work?

Hosting distributors offer you content storage space for your web site on their high-powered computers (web hosting servers) and ensure constant Internet access. When somebody writes your domain (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can take a glance at the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the advancement of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the various expectations of website owners, among them shared hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared website hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where a single web hosting server is divided between plenty of hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and web server disk space quotas that they have been allotted. This type of website hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't have to purchase the whole server upfront, since it is shared among many web hosting clients, and the web hosting supplier can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting vendor takes care of all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The downside of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other shared hosting account owners and if one web site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but the majority of web hosting service providers, including us at Palm Servers, have protection systems in place that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a web hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, the majority of hosting vendors and web hosting clients simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the web hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting distributors strive to provide reasonable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for example, provide different hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your funds. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one free-of-charge domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a virtual web hosting server package is a good option. private virtual server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other Virtual Private Server hosting customers, but the hard disk is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your private virtual hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Server Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Server Web Hosting solution, the user obtains an entire dedicated web hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers plenty of customization possibilities - the dedicated hosting users can select the hardware and software specifications that will match their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting server is an excellent option for a resource-consuming corporate web portal, for instance - you will not share the dedicated hosting web server's resources with anyone else and will be granted full root-level access. You will have full authority over the physical server, which will allow you to make any server configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical expertise is needed - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated web hosting solution also costs much more, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other clients.

A website hosting tip for beginners

If you are just starting to develop your website and need a hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most reasonable choice. If your site grows beyond your website 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, since only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the remaining time until the expiration date. Besides, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS hosting server or a dedicated hosting server without needing to swap web hosting providers.