Hosting Unveiled

Hosting is a service that hosting firms provide so that you can upload your web site to the Internet.

How can people find your website?

When you set up a web site and you would like other people to spot it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to render the site accessible online by hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting providers offer you disk drive storage space for your site on their high-power computers (web servers) and ensure constant website availability. When someone writes your web address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a glimpse at the content of your web site.

Types of hosting

With the progress of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to match the various expectations of web site possessors, among them shared web hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single hosting server is shared between a lot of hosting users who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and web server disk drive space quotas that they have been allotted. This form of website hosting is commonly less expensive - you don't need to buy the entire hosting server upfront, since it is shared among multiple customers, and the web hosting company can afford to provide much lower prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other hosting users and if a given web site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that web server, but the majority of web hosting providers, including us at Web Hosting For Life, have protection systems in place that prevent that from taking place.

A definition of a web hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most web hosting suppliers and hosting clients simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosting providers strive to offer cheap prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your funds. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will get a present - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS packages

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual hosting server package is a possible solution. Virtual Private Server web hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other Virtual Private Server web hosting account owners, but the server is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual hosting server are not shared. Also, the virtualization technology gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical expertise.

Dedicated Package

With the Dedicated Package solution, the customer gets an entire web server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers multiple configuration options - the dedicated web server hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their demands. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server is a perfect option for a high resource-consuming corporate site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full root privileges. You will exert full authority over the machine, which will enable you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical expertise is required - unless you hire an Information Technology professional, it will be your responsibility to administer and configure the physical server. The dedicated web hosting solution also costs much more, because the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other customers.

A hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just starting to develop your web site and are looking for a web hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most suitable choice. If your site grows beyond your web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your data, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more advanced one at any given time without having to worry about the time left until the expiration date. In addition, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS web hosting server or a dedicated hosting web server without having to switch hosting providers.