What Precisely is Shared Hosting?

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

How can people discern your web site?

When you build a site and you would like other individuals to visit it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the site available on the web by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting companies offer you hard disk space for your website on their powerful computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet connection. When somebody writes your web site address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can take a gaze at the content of your web site.

Types of web hosting

With the growth of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to fulfill the different expectations of website proprietors, among them shared website hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one hosting server is shared among lots of web hosting clients who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and hosting space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is generally less expensive - you don't have to buy the whole server in advance, since it is shared between a lot of web hosting clients, and the web hosting services provider can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting provider handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The downside of the shared hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if one site becomes really popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other websites on that web server, but most web hosts, including us at Su Host, have protection platforms in place that prevent that from taking place.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, the majority of hosting service providers and hosting customers simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the hosting marketplace, the majority of hosting providers try to provide modest prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different website hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your resources. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an acronym for 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 web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a private virtual server web hosting package is a possible solution. virtual server web hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other Virtual Private Server hosting users, but the hard disk is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization technology offers you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual web hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets a whole dedicated web hosting server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers loads of configuration options - the dedicated server hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specs that will answer their requirements. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting package is a perfect solution for a popular corporate website, for instance - you will not share the dedicated web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with full server root privileges. You will exercise full control over the web server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The setback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical knowledge is required - unless you employ an Information Technology pro, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more costly, because the cost of the server isn't shared between any other clients.

A website hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just starting to develop your website and need a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most reasonable option. If your website grows beyond 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, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any given time without worrying about the number of days remaining before the expiration date. Additionally, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to switch to a private virtual web server hosting platform or a dedicated server web hosting solution without needing to switch hosting service providers.