What is Shared Website Hosting?

The most elemental and universally availed of variety of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It represents a means to host your web site without having to know much about programming and running a hosting server. What's more, it's also the cheapest form of web hosting and it's indeed affordable for anybody. Still, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name designates, the shared hosting solution is a kind of service where a lot of customers share the reserves of the same hosting server. This signifies that all server ingredients such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, network interface cards and so on, are allotted among the users whose accounts are on that very same hosting server. This is normally rendered possible by creating separate accounts for the different customers and allocating specific limitations and quotas for each of them. Those limitations are assigned in order to hinder the users from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the web server from overburdening. Normally, shared hosting customers do not have root-level access to the hosting server's config files, which primarily suggests that they cannot access anything else on the hosting server beside their own personal web hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may use are set by the web hosting corporation that owns the web hosting server and by the respective website hosting package. That entails the second vital question:

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

Hosting firms that provide shared hosting services commonly have diverse hosting packages. Those packages contain different amounts of web hosting resources and specs, which in fact set the restrictions that a web hosting plan will have. The user may select between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will suit him best. The web hosting plan will then define what restrictions the client's account will have, once opened. The prices and the specifications of the web hosting packages are defined by the specific web hosting firm. Depending on the policy of the firm, the shared hosting service can be divided into two categories - the free hosting service and the common shared solution, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" firms as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to declare, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they really are determined by the marketing tactics of the given corporation and, of course, the needs of the given customer.

What is the contrast between the free of cost and the typical shared hosting solution?

Of course, the major difference between the free and the paid solution is in the amount of features that they offer. Free web hosting providers are not capable of maintaining a large amount of hosting servers, therefore, they plainly host more customers on one single web server by reducing the amount of resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only if the web hosting servers are supervised and dealt with properly, since the big number of accounts may make the server crash repeatedly. Most of the free web hosting providers, though, ignore the quality of the service and as a result, it's quite tough to discover a free of charge hosting solution that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting suppliers typically offer free technical support even to the free web hosting customers, because they want their sites to grow so that they eventually move to a paid web hosting package, which includes more website hosting features. Such vendor, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and oldest free web hosting firms worldwide.

On the other hand, traditional shared hosting vendors like us, may afford to maintain lots of web servers and therefore, we may afford to offer much more powerful hosting packages. Of course, that reflects on the cost of the web hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web hosting package, however, does not automatically signify that this solution has a finer quality. The most advantageous services are the balanced ones, which offer a fee that corresponds to the real service which you're obtaining. Additionally, we also provide a free extra with the web hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of free-of-charge site layouts. As a web hosting firm, we do care about our reputation and that's why if you go with us, you can rest confident that you won't get deceived into paying for a package that you cannot actually use.

What should I expect from a shared hosting service?

The shared hosting service is best for individuals who wish to host an average website, which is going to utilize a small or medium amount of bandwidth each month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business gets bigger, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. Hence, you will have to eventually move to a more powerful website hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (aka a private virtual web server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when selecting a hosting provider, you should also ponder about scalability, otherwise you might end up migrating your domain manually to a different distributor, which can cause web site complications and even prolonged downtime for your site. If you pick St8forward Hosting as your web hosting company, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the required domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is vital and will save you lots of nuisances in the long run.