How Does Hosting Operate?

Hosting is a service that web hosting companies provide so that you can upload your website online.

How can people view your website?

When you make a web site and you want other persons to view it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to make the web site reachable online by 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 hosting work?

Web hosting distributors offer you storage space for your site on their high-end computers (web hosting servers) and ensure continuous network connectivity. When somebody writes your website 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 examine the content of your website.

Hosting varieties

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

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one web hosting server is divided between numerous hosting clients who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is usually cheaper - you don't have to pay for the entire web server upfront, since it is shared among a lot of web hosting account holders, and the web hosting vendor can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-configured with all the required software and the hosting distributor takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other web hosting users and if a given site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web server, but most web hosting firms, including us at ICT Gurus EA Best Hosting, have protection systems in place that impede that from taking place.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most common form of web hosting, the majority of hosting distributors and hosting clients simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is an extensive rivalry on the website hosting marketplace, the majority of hosting companies endeavor to offer low prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your budget. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will get a bonus - one free-of-cost domain registration.

VPS services

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a virtual server web hosting package is an appropriate option. Virtual Private Server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual private web server hosting clients, but the hard drive is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization technology gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual server, but it also calls for a higher degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets an entire dedicated hosting server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most flexible of all hosting solutions and offers a myriad of customization possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting customers can select the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their requirements. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting web server is a perfect choice for a busy business web site, for example - you will not share the physical server's system resources with anyone else and will be given root access. You will exercise complete authority over the machine, which will allow you to make any configuration modifications that you might need. The downside of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical knowledge is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology specialist, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also much more expensive, because the cost of the server isn't shared between any other customers.

A web hosting tip for novices

If you are just starting to build your website and are looking for a website hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution remains the wisest option. If your website grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the time remaining until the expiration date. Additionally, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting package and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to move to a VPS server hosting platform or a dedicated server hosting platform without needing to change web hosting providers.