How Website Hosting Operates

Website hosting is a service that web hosting suppliers offer so that you can put your website online.

How can people check out your web site?

When you build a site and you wish other individuals to observe it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to render the web site accessible on the Internet by website hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why hosting services came into existence.

How does website hosting work?

Hosting providers provide you with hard drive space for your website on their powerful computers (servers) and guarantee constant network uptime. When somebody types your domain name (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can see the content of your site.

Types of web hosting

With the growth of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the different requirements of website owners, among them shared website hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is divided among numerous hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and disk drive space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of web hosting is commonly less expensive - you don't have to buy the entire server in advance, since it is shared among numerous users, and the web hosting company can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting vendor takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The weakness of the shared hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other web hosting clients and if one web site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of hosting suppliers, including us at I-Solutions Hosting, have security platforms at work that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a web hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, most web hosting distributors and hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the website hosting market, most hosting service providers strive to offer moderate prices and gifts with their services. We, for example, offer different web hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you select the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a gift - one free domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting account, a virtual web hosting server plan is a possible choice. VPS web server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual server web hosting clients, but the server is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS hosting server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the user obtains an entire physical machine and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers lots of customization possibilities - the dedicated server hosting customers can select the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting package is an excellent choice for a high resource-absorbing business web portal, for instance - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will receive complete server root access. You will have complete control over the web server, which will enable you to implement any configuration modifications that you might require. The drawback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical competence is required - unless you employ an IT pro, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also much more costly, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting tip for novices

If you are just beginning to develop your site and are looking for a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared web hosting solution persists to be the best choice. If your website grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your files, since only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular moment without worrying about the time left before expiration. In addition, if you finally reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to switch to a Virtual Private Server hosting solution or a dedicated server without the need to switch web hosting service providers.