How Website Hosting Functions

Website hosting is a service that web hosting vendors offer so that you can publish your website online.

How can people access your site?

When you develop a site and you would like other persons to visit it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the site visible online by website hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why web hosting services exist.

How does website hosting work?

Hosting providers provide you with space for your web site on their high-powered computers (hosting servers) and ensure uninterrupted Internet connectivity. When someone writes your website address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can have a look at the content of your web site.

Web hosting types

With the growth of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into existence to answer the different requirements of web site possessors, among them shared hosting services, private virtual server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where a single hosting server is divided between multiple hosting clients who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and web hosting server storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of web hosting is usually less expensive - you don't have to purchase the entire server in advance, as it is shared between a lot of hosting account holders, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to provide much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting vendor handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The setback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other web hosting clients and if one web site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web hosting server, but most web hosting companies, including us at iClick and Host - Reliable webhosting at lowest prices, have security platforms in place that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, the majority of hosting distributors and web hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the website hosting market, the majority of hosting vendors strive to offer cheap prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one cost-free domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a private virtual server plan is a good solution. virtual server web hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS server web hosting account owners, but the hard disk drive is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual web server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the client gets an entire physical machine and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers tons of customization options - the dedicated server web hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their needs. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server is an excellent choice for a high resource-devouring business web site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be granted full server root privileges. You will exercise complete authority over the hosting server, which will permit you to make any configuration changes that you might require. The downside of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical knowledge is needed - unless you engage an Information Technology expert, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other customers.

A website hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just starting to develop your web site and need a hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent option. If your web site grows beyond your web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your files, because only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without worrying about the time remaining before the expiration date. Also, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it signifies that your site's popularity has risen!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a private virtual web server hosting platform or a dedicated hosting web server without having to switch hosting providers.