What Indeed is Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a service that hosting corporations provide so that you can put your web site on the World Wide Web.

How can people notice your web site?

When you create a site and you want other persons to notice it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to render the website reachable on the World Wide Web by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting corporations provide you with hard disk space for your site on their high-powered computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet connection. When somebody writes your URL (for example 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 glimpse at the content of your website.

Types of hosting

With the advancement of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various demands of web site owners, including shared website hosting services, VPS server web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most common type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one server is shared between a lot of web hosting users who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and hard disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of web hosting is typically cheaper - you don't need to buy the entire server in advance, as it is shared among a lot of hosting customers, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much cheaper prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting supplier handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other shared hosting account holders and if one site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other websites on that web hosting server, but the majority of hosting service providers, including us at Penny Domains - Cheap Domain Names and Hosting, have protection systems in place that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a hosting service

Since shared hosting is the most common form of web hosting, the majority of hosting providers and hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the hosting market, most hosting vendors try to offer reasonable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for example, provide different hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one cost-free domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared web hosting plan, a Virtual Private Server is a good choice. private virtual web server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual server web hosting account owners, but the disk space is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS server are not shared. Also, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your virtual private web server, but it also calls for a more advanced level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user gets a whole dedicated web hosting server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most flexible of all web hosting solutions and offers loads of customization possibilities - the dedicated web server hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specifications that will satisfy their needs. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is a perfect option for a large-scale business portal, for instance - you will not share the physical machine's resources with anyone else and will have full server root privileges. You will have full authority over the server, which will enable you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is needed - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the server isn't shared among any other customers.

A website hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just starting to build your web site and are looking for a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most suitable choice. If your website grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your data, since only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular time without having to worry about the time left until expiration. Furthermore, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it signifies that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to migrate to a private virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution without the need to change web hosting service providers.