How Hosting Services Operates

Hosting is a service that hosting vendors provide so that you can publish your website on the Internet.

How can people access your web site?

When you make a web site and you would like other people to discern it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a server. If you try to render the web site reachable on the Internet by hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting firms offer you disk drive space for your site on their powerful computers (web servers) and ensure constant network uptime. When somebody writes your domain name (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 have a peek at the content of your website.

Hosting types

With the advance of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have appeared to fulfill the various needs of website owners, among them shared hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single server is shared between a lot of shared hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and server disk space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of web hosting is commonly less expensive - you don't have to buy the whole web server in advance, since it is divided between lots of users, and the web hosting services provider can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting supplier takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other individuals and if one site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web server, but most web hosting providers, including us at ICT Gurus EA Best Hosting, have security platforms at work that hinder that from happening.

A description of a web hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most commonly used type of web hosting, most hosting companies and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge rivalry on the hosting market, the majority of web hosting vendors strive to offer low prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for example, provide different web hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your budget. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one free-of-charge 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 server hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting package, a private virtual web hosting server plan is a possible option. VPS web hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual web server hosting account owners, but the hard disk is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual web hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization technology offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual web hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains an entire dedicated hosting web server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of customization possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting customers can select the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated server is an excellent choice for a resource-requiring corporate portal, for instance - you will not share the dedicated hosting web server's resources with anyone else and will gain full root access. You will exercise full control over the physical server, which will permit you to make any configuration modifications that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical know-how is required - unless you employ an Information Technology expert, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also much more costly, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared among any other users.

A website hosting recommendation for beginner users

If you are just starting to create your website and are seeking a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most logical option. If your web site outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your website 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 moment without worrying about the number of days remaining before expiration. Moreover, if you finally reach the most advanced shared hosting package and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your site's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to move to a virtual private web hosting server or a dedicated web hosting platform without having to change hosting providers.