What Precisely is Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting is a service that hosting service providers offer so that you can upload your site to the World Wide Web.
How can people view your site?
When you create a website and you want other individuals to visit it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to make the site reachable online by shared hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why web hosting services appeared.
How does shared hosting work?
Web hosting corporations provide you with content storage space for your site on their high-powered computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee uninterrupted website availability. When somebody writes your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a peek at the content of your site.
Types of web hosting
With the advancement of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to match the different requirements of website possessors, among them shared hosting services, Virtual Private Server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.
Shared hosting
Shared website hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single server is shared among a lot of hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and web server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't need to buy the entire server in advance, since it is shared between a lot of hosting account holders, and the web hosting company can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting company handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.
The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if a given web site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that web server, but most hosting service providers, including us at Elasticis Hosting+, have security platforms at work that hinder that from happening.
A definition of a hosting service
Since shared website hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, most web hosts and web hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of hosting distributors strive to offer cheap prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your resources. If you select the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a present - one charge-free domain registration.
VPS hosting
VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting account, a private virtual hosting server plan is an appropriate choice. VPS web server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server web hosting account holders, but the disk space 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 server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical competence.
Dedicated Server
With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer gets a whole web server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers a myriad of configuration possibilities - the dedicated web hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specifications that will match their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting package is an excellent solution for a high resource-absorbing corporate web site, for instance - you will not share the hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will obtain complete root-level access. You will exercise full control over the physical machine, which will enable you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical proficiency is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology specialist, it will be your responsibility to administer and configure the dedicated server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared between any other users.
A hosting recommendation for beginners
If you are just starting to create your site and are looking for a web hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most relevant option. If your site grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, because only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given time without worrying about the time remaining before expiration. In addition, if you finally reach the most advanced shared hosting package and still require more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has risen!), there always is the possibility to switch to a VPS web hosting platform or a dedicated server hosting platform without the need to switch web hosting service providers.
