Shared Hosting Description

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting corporations provide so that you can get your site online.

How can people reach your website?

When you make a site and you would like other persons to check it out, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to make the site reachable on the Internet by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why web hosting services came into being.

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting distributors provide you with hard drive storage space for your site on their powerful computers (hosting servers) and guarantee continuous Internet connectivity. When somebody writes your web site address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a gaze at the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the advancement of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to fulfill the various needs of web site proprietors, including shared website hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one server is divided between multiple shared web hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, traffic and data space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of website hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't have to pay for the whole hosting server upfront, since it is shared between a lot of web hosting account owners, and the web hosting supplier can afford to provide much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting distributor takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The weakness of the shared hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other web hosting account holders and if one site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other web sites on that hosting server, but most hosting providers, including us at Asterhost.com, have security platforms at work that obstruct that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, most web hosting vendors and web hosting users simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a big competition on the hosting marketplace, most web hosting firms endeavor to offer moderate prices and bonuses with their services. We, for example, offer different website hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will get a present - one free-of-cost domain registration.

Virtual private servers plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a Virtual Private Server web hosting package is an excellent choice. virtual web server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS web server hosting users, but the hard disk drive is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your VPS web server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains an entire physical machine and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers countless customization possibilities - the dedicated server hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-demanding corporate portal, for example - you will not share the physical machine's resources with anyone else and will receive full root access. You will exert complete control over the hosting server, which will allow you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weakness of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is required - unless you hire an IT professional, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the physical server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also far more costly, because the cost of the physical server isn't shared between any other clients.

A website hosting recommendation for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your web site and are looking for a hosting solution to commence with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the smartest option. If your website outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining until expiration. Moreover, if you finally reach the most powerful shared website hosting package and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to move to a VPS hosting platform or a dedicated web server hosting platform without the need to change hosting service providers.