What Does Shared Hosting Denote?

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting distributors offer so that you can get your site online.

How can people check out your site?

When you make a site and you would like other individuals to access it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the site reachable online by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting firms provide you with hard drive storage space for your site on their powerful computers (web servers) and ensure continuous website availability. When someone writes your domain name (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a look at the content of your web site.

Web hosting varieties

With the progress of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the different expectations of web site possessors, including shared website hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where a single web server is shared among lots of shared hosting account holders who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and hosting server disk storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of web hosting is normally less expensive - you don't need to pay for the whole web server in advance, as it is shared between multiple web hosting account owners, and the web hosting distributor can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting services provider handles 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 shared web hosting account holders and if a given web site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web server, but most hosting vendors, including us at inticweb, have protection systems at work that prevent that from occurring.

A definition of a web hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most commonly used type of web hosting, most hosting providers and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the web hosting market, most hosting distributors strive to provide affordable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your budget. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will obtain a present - one free domain registration.

Virtual private servers plans

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared web hosting account, a private virtual hosting server is an excellent solution. Virtual Private Server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS hosting account owners, but the hard drive space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your VPS web hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets a whole hosting server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all web hosting solutions and offers a lot of customization possibilities - the dedicated web hosting users can choose the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is a perfect solution for a resource-consuming corporate site, for example - you will not share the dedicated hosting server's resources with anyone else and will obtain root privileges. You will have complete control over the machine, which will enable you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The downside of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology pro, it will be your duty to manage and configure the physical server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other users.

A web hosting tip for novices

If you are just beginning to build your web site and are seeking a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared hosting solution remains the wisest option. If your site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. In addition, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it indicates that your website's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a private virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated server hosting solution without needing to change hosting service providers.