Shared Hosting Uncovered
The most standard and regularly used type of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It constitutes a means to host your web portal without having to understand much about programming and managing a web server. In addition to this, it's also the cheapest form of web hosting and it's indeed affordable for everybody. Still, what is shared hosting?
What is shared hosting?
As the name implies, the shared hosting service is a form of service where many customers share the system reserves of one and the same web server. This denotes that all hosting server elements such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, network cards etc. are shared among the clients whose accounts are on that same server. This is normally rendered accomplishable by setting up different accounts for the separate users and appointing given limits and quotas for each of them. Those limits are applied in order to hinder the customers from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the web server from overloading. Usually, shared hosting clients do not have root access to the server's configuration files, which essentially means that they cannot access anything else on the web server apart from their own personal web hosting account. The website hosting features that each account may use are set by the hosting company that owns the server and by the given web hosting plan. That leads to the second important question:
How are the shared hosting servers shared among the clients?
Hosting companies that supply shared hosting plans normally have different web hosting packages. Those plans include diverse amounts of hosting features and specs, which actually fix the limitations that a website hosting package will include. The customer may pick between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will fit him best. The website hosting plan will then define what restrictions the user's account will involve, once set up. The prices and the specifications of the website hosting plans are determined by the actual hosting vendor. Depending on the policy of the provider, the shared hosting service falls into two categories - the free hosting solution and the regular shared service, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" sellers as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to judge, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from one another and they really are determined by the business policy of the particular company and, of course, the needs of the given user.
What is the distinction between the free of cost and the classic shared hosting service?
Of course, the principal difference between the free and the paid service is in the amount of features that they contain. Free website hosting companies are not able to maintain an enormous amount of web servers, hence, they merely accommodate more users on one single web server by reducing the quantity of resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only in case the servers are monitored and maintained properly, because the large number of accounts may make the web hosting server crash over and over again. The majority of the free website hosting suppliers, though, overlook the quality of the service and therefore, it's very hard to come across a free of cost hosting solution that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting vendors commonly offer free client support even to the free website hosting clients, since they want their web portals to grow so that they subsequently move to a paid web hosting package, which offers more web hosting resources. One such provider, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the biggest and eldest free web hosting companies worldwide.
On the other hand, traditional shared hosting suppliers such as us, are able to maintain a lot of web servers and hence, we may afford to offer much more powerful web hosting packages. Of course, that affects the cost of the web hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a web hosting solution, though, does not necessarily imply that this account has a better quality. The best solutions are the balanced ones, which offer a fee that corresponds to the actual service which you're obtaining. Besides, we also give a free bonus with the hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of charge-free web design layouts. As a website hosting distributor, we do worry about our good name and this is the reason why if you go with us, you can be confident that you won't get swindled into paying for a plan that you cannot actually use.
What should I expect from a shared hosting service?
The shared hosting service is best for people who want to host a normal site, which is going to devour a small or medium amount of bandwidth each month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business develops, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. So, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich hosting solution like a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (also known as a virtual web hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when selecting a web hosting distributor, you should also reflect about scalability, or else you might end up migrating your domain manually to a separate provider, which can cause website troubles and even extended downtime for your website. If you select as your website hosting company, you can rest safe that we can present you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is essential and will save you lots of frustrations in the future.