A description of web site hosting

The most archetypal and popularly utilized form of web hosting is the shared web hosting service. It's a way to host your website without having to be much informed about programming and administering a web hosting server. Additionally, it's also the most economical type of web page hosting and it's in fact affordable for anybody. Still, what is shared webspace hosting?

What is shared web hosting?

As the name denotes, the shared web page hosting service is a type of service where multiple customers share the resources of the same web server. This signifies that all server constituents such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, network interface cards and so on, are allotted among the clients whose accounts are on that same hosting server. This is typically made feasible by creating different accounts for the different clients and setting specific restrictions and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those limitations are applied in order to hinder the users from interfering with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the server from overburdening. Typically, shared web site hosting customers do not have full root access to the web hosting server's config files, which essentially denotes that they cannot access anything else on the web hosting server aside from their very own website page hosting account. The web page hosting resources that each account may avail of are determined by the web hosting provider that owns the web hosting server and by the given web site hosting plan. That entails the second vital question:

How are the shared hosting web servers shared among the users?

Hosting vendors that distribute shared web site hosting solutions typically have different web site hosting plans. Those plans involve diverse amounts of web site hosting resources and specs, which actually set the limitations that a webspace hosting account will include. The customer may choose between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will fit him best. The web site hosting plan will then define what restrictions the user's account will include, once set up. The costs and the specs of the web space hosting plans are set by the given web hosting company. Based on the policy of the vendor, the shared web site hosting solution falls into 2 categories - the free hosting solution and the popular shared service, most recently very famous among "cPanel hosting" firms as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to judge, which one is more preferable, since they are quite different from each other and they really are dependent on the business policy of the specific vendor and, of course, the requirements of the specific user.

What is the difference between the free and the classic shared web hosting service?

Of course, the essential difference between the free of charge and the paid service is in the quantity of features that they contain. Free website hosting distributors are not able to maintain a huge amount of web servers, therefore, they plainly host more clients on one web server by reducing the amount of resources provided by the accounts. This will be efficient only in case the web servers are monitored and handled appropriately, since the enormous amount of accounts may cause the hosting server to crash frequently. Most of the free web hosting corporations, however, neglect the quality of the service and hence, it's quite difficult to stumble upon a free hosting solution that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting vendors commonly provide free technical support even to the free website hosting customers, because they want their web sites to grow so that they eventually migrate to a paid web space hosting account, which includes more web site hosting resources. Such corporation, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and oldest free site hosting distributors in the world.

At the same time, established shared web hosting companies such as Free Hostia, for example, are able to maintain a lot of web servers and therefore, they are able to offer much more feature-rich web site hosting packages. Of course, that affects the cost of the hosting plans. Paying a higher price for a web hosting plan, though, does not necessarily signify that this service has a finer quality. The most advantageous services are the balanced ones, which offer a price that corresponds to the real service which you're obtaining. The best site hosting vendors that have been around for a long time are listing their prices and plan specifications in an objective way, so that the client may be informed of what indeed he is obtaining. Additionally, some of these give a free extra with the web site hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with 100's of free-of-charge web design skins that are provided by 'Free Hostia'. Such website hosting distributors do worry about their good name and that's why if you choose them, you can rest certain that you won't get beguiled into buying a package that you cannot actually avail of.

What should I expect from a shared website hosting service?

The shared web space hosting service is best for persons who want to host an average web page, which is going to generate a small or medium amount of web traffic every month. You cannot expect, though, that a shared site hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business gets bigger, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. So, you will have to ultimately move to a more powerful web hosting service like a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (a.k.a. a private virtual web hosting server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. Therefore, when selecting a site hosting company, you should also reflect about how they can be of service to you, otherwise you might end up transferring your domain name manually to a separate vendor, which can bring about site complications and even extended downtime for your web page. Hence, selecting a hosting distributor like 'Free Hostia', which can provide you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is crucial and will spare you lots of nuisances in the long run.