Shared Hosting Definition

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting suppliers provide so that you can get your website online.

How can people view your site?

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

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting firms offer you hard disk space for your site on their high-powered computers (web servers) and ensure constant Internet connection. When someone types your domain (e.g. 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 peek at the content of your web site.

Hosting varieties

With the progress of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the various requirements of web site owners, including shared website hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single server is divided among numerous web hosting clients who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and hosting server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been allotted. This type of website hosting is generally cheaper - you don't have to buy the whole web server in advance, as it is divided among many hosting customers, and the web hosting provider can afford to provide much more reasonable prices. It is also much easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The setback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other customers and if one site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but the majority of web hosts, including us at AllMyHosting, have protection systems in place that prevent that from occurring.

A description of a hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, most web hosting providers and web hosting clients simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the web hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting vendors try to provide affordable prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your funds. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one free-of-charge domain registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual web hosting server is an appropriate choice. private virtual web server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS hosting clients, but the disk drive is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your virtual web hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user obtains an entire dedicated server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers multiple configuration possibilities - the clients can pick the hardware and software specs that will answer their requirements. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting package is an excellent option for a heavy-traffic business web portal, for example - you will not share the dedicated web server's resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with full root access. You will exercise full control over the physical machine, which will enable you to implement any configuration modifications that you might require. The drawback of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is required - unless you employ an Information Technology expert, it will be your duty to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other users.

A hosting advice for beginners

If you are just starting to build your web site and need a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution remains the smartest option. If your web site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your files, because only the parameters of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular moment without worrying about the time left until the expiration date. Moreover, if you finally reach the most advanced shared hosting package and still require more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to migrate to a private virtual web server hosting platform or a dedicated server hosting platform without the need to change hosting service providers.