How Does Shared Hosting Function?

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

How can people find your web site?

When you develop a web site and you want other persons to access it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to make the website visible on the Internet by shared hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why web hosting services appeared.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting companies offer you storage space for your website on their high-power computers (hosting servers) and guarantee constant network connectivity. When somebody types your web site address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your web site.

Types of web hosting

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

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single web server is shared between a lot of web hosting users who are limited by the CPU, traffic and disk storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of hosting is generally cheaper - you don't have to buy the whole server upfront, since it is divided between plenty of web hosting users, and the hosting services provider can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting company takes care of all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other clients and if one website becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of hosting providers, including us at STEERWEB, have protection systems in place that obstruct that from happening.

A definition of a web hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most common type of web hosting, the majority of hosting providers and hosting clients simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the website hosting marketplace, most web hosting firms endeavor to provide cheap prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you pick the annual invoicing cycle, you will receive a present - one free-of-charge domain registration.

Virtual private servers packages

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 server hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a virtual server package is a good option. Virtual Private Server web hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual server web hosting customers, but the hard disk drive is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your VPS web server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user obtains an entire hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers a multitude of configuration options - the dedicated server web hosting clients can choose the hardware and software specifications that will answer their requirements. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web server hosting plan is an excellent option for a large-scale corporate site, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will obtain root-level access. You will exert full control over the physical server, which will enable you to make any configuration changes that you might require. The downside of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical expertise is required - unless you hire an Information Technology pro, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated hosting solution is also much more costly, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other clients.

A hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to develop your web site and are searching for a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared hosting solution remains the most reasonable option. If your site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your web site files, because only the parameters of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular time without worrying about the remaining time before expiration. Furthermore, if you finally reach the most powerful shared website hosting package and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your site's popularity has risen!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS server or a dedicated server web hosting solution without the need to change hosting providers.