Web Hosting Explained

Web hosting is a service that web hosting firms offer so that you can put your website on the World Wide Web.

How can people reach your site?

When you develop a website and you wish other individuals to visit it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to render the site accessible on the Internet by web hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting distributors offer you content storage space for your site on their high-end computers (hosting servers) and guarantee continuous network uptime. When somebody types your web address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can see the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the growth of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have appeared to match the different demands of website proprietors, among them shared hosting services, private virtual web server hosting services and dedicated 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 one web server is divided between lots of hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and disk drive space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of website hosting is generally cheaper - you don't need to pay for the entire web hosting server upfront, since it is divided among many web hosting customers, and the web hosting services provider can afford to provide much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting vendor takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The weakness of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other shared hosting account holders and if a given website becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but most hosting distributors, including us at Hostddl.com, have security systems in place that impede that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most hosting vendors and web hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a great competition on the web hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting providers endeavor to provide moderate prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your finances. If you pick the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free-of-charge domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a VPS web server hosting package is a suitable choice. VPS web hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual server hosting account holders, but the hard drive is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical competence.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the user gets a whole dedicated hosting web server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of configuration possibilities - the dedicated web hosting users can select the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web server is a perfect solution for a large-scale corporate portal, for example - you will not share the hosting server's resources with anyone else and will have complete root-level access. You will exert full control over the web hosting server, which will allow you to make any configuration modifications that you might require. The drawback of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is needed - unless you engage an IT pro, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the dedicated server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other clients.

A hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just beginning to develop your site and are searching for a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most suitable choice. If your web site grows beyond your web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your website files, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular moment without worrying about the time left before the expiration date. Furthermore, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your web site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to switch to a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated web hosting solution without the need to change web hosting providers.