What Precisely is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is a service that hosting corporations offer so that you can put your website on the Internet.

How can people view your web site?

When you create a web site and you wish other persons to check it out, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the web site available on the World Wide Web by shared hosting it on your own personal 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?

Hosting firms offer you space for your site on their powerful computers (hosting servers) and guarantee constant website availability. When someone types your web address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can examine the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the growth of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the different demands of website possessors, among them shared website hosting services, virtual server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one server is shared between plenty of shared web hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and disk storage space quotas that they have been allotted. This type of web hosting is normally less expensive - you don't need to purchase the whole server upfront, as it is shared between lots of clients, and the web hosting services provider can afford to offer much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting supplier takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The drawback of the shared hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if one site becomes really popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web server, but the majority of hosting distributors, including us at PN Scripts, have protection systems in place that prevent that from occurring.

A description of a web hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting service providers and hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is a large competition on the hosting market, the majority of hosting service providers strive to offer reasonable prices and gifts with their services. We, for instance, offer different hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you select the annual invoicing cycle, you will get a present - one free domain registration.

Virtual private servers

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers 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 hosting package, a private virtual server plan is a good solution. virtual web server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server hosting clients, but the disk drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your server, but it also calls for a higher degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer gets a whole server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers multiple customization options - the users can choose the hardware and software specs that will match their needs. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting plan is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-requiring business website, for example - you will not share the dedicated server's resources with anyone else and will be given root access. You will have full authority over the hosting server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is required - unless you hire an Information Technology pro, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the server. The dedicated server hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other customers.

A website hosting advice for beginners

If you are just starting to develop your website and need a hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution remains the wisest option. If your web site grows beyond your shared web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since 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 moment without having to worry about the time remaining before expiration. Besides, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it indicates that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to move to a VPS web server hosting solution or a dedicated hosting server without needing to swap web hosting providers.