Shared Hosting Description

Shared hosting is a service that companies offer so that you can publish your website online.

How can people visit your website?

When you build a site and you would like other individuals to observe it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the website accessible online by shared hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why web hosting services came into being.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting companies provide you with hard drive space for your website on their powerful computers (hosting servers) and guarantee continuous Internet connection. When somebody types your URL (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can see the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the growth of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various demands of website proprietors, including shared website hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one server is divided between multiple hosting customers who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and hosting server disk storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't need to purchase the whole web server in advance, since it is divided between lots of web hosting account owners, and the hosting services provider can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if a given site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that server, but most hosting distributors, including us at Mission Springs Webs Hosting, have security platforms at work that obstruct that from occurring.

A description of a hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of web hosting vendors and hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge competition on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosting suppliers try to offer reasonable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you choose the annual billing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a VPS plan is a good solution. private virtual web server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server hosting customers, but the hard disk drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private web hosting server are not shared. Also, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical expertise.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the client obtains a whole 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 a myriad of customization possibilities - the dedicated web hosting customers can select the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their needs. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server is a perfect solution for a high resource-devouring corporate web site, for instance - you will not share the web server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full server root privileges. You will exercise complete authority over the web hosting server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is needed - unless you engage an Information Technology specialist, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the physical server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more costly, because the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared among any other clients.

A website hosting advice for novices

If you are just beginning to set up your web site and are searching for a hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most intelligent choice. If your website outgrows your hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your data, since only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. Furthermore, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to switch to a private virtual web hosting server or a dedicated server without the need to change hosting service providers.