What Does Shared Hosting Mean?

Shared Web Hosting Explained

The most elemental and popularly availed of form of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It represents a means to host your web page without having to know much about programming and administering a web hosting server. Besides, it’s also the most inexpensive form of web hosting and it’s indeed affordable for everybody. However, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name signifies, the shared hosting solution is a form of service where many customers share the resources of the same web hosting server. This indicates that all web server components like CPU, hard disks, RAM, network cards and so on, are allotted among the customers whose accounts are on that very same web hosting server. This is typically rendered possible by setting up different accounts for the different customers and applying certain limitations and usage quotas for each of them. Those limitations are applied so as to hinder the users from interfering with each other’s accounts and, of course, to prevent the web hosting server from overloading. Typically, shared hosting customers do not have complete root access to the server’s configuration files, which basically means that they cannot access anything else on the server beside their own personal hosting account. The web hosting resources that each account may avail of are determined by the hosting vendor that possesses the web hosting server and by the particular web hosting package. That entails the second essential question:

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

Hosting corporations that supply shared hosting plans usually have various web hosting packages. Those packages offer different amounts of website hosting resources and specifications, which in fact define the limitations that a website hosting package will include. The customer may select between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will suit him best. The web hosting package will then determine what restrictions the client’s account will involve, once set up. The prices and the specifications of the web hosting plans are specified by the given hosting company. Depending on the policy of the corporation, the shared hosting service falls into two categories – the free hosting service and the normal shared service, currently very popular among “cPanel hosting” merchants as a cloud web hosting one. It’s impossible to state, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they really depend on the business strategy of the particular corporation and, of course, the needs of the given customer.

What is the difference between the free and the normal shared hosting service?

Of course, the chief difference between the free of cost and the paid solution is in the quantity of features that they provide. Free website hosting firms are not capable of keeping a large amount of web servers, therefore, they merely host more customers on one single web hosting server by reducing the quantity of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be efficient only in case the servers are monitored and administered properly, because the large amount of accounts may make the web server crash repeatedly. The majority of the free web hosting vendors, though, neglect the quality of the service and as a result, it’s quite hard to discover a free of charge website hosting solution that’s actually worth the time. The top free hosting corporations typically offer free technical support even to the free website hosting clients, since they want their web sites to expand so that they subsequently migrate to a paid hosting package, which includes more hosting resources. Such firm, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and eldest free hosting vendors worldwide.

On the other hand, traditional shared hosting companies such as us, are able to keep a lot of hosting servers and as a result, we are able to provide much more feature-rich hosting plans. Of course, that affects the cost of the web hosting plans. Paying a higher price for a web hosting plan, though, does not automatically mean that this plan has a better quality. The most optimal solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a price that matches the actual service which you’re obtaining. Additionally, we also give a free bonus with the website hosting package, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of fee-free templates. As a web hosting companie, we do care about our reputation and that’s why if you choose us, you can rest confident that you won’t get fooled into paying for a service that you cannot in fact use.

What should I anticipate from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting service is best for those who want to host a standard web site, which is going to utilize a small or medium amount of bandwidth every month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business gets bigger, your site will become more and more resource consuming. So, you will have to ultimately upgrade to a more feature-rich web hosting service like a semi-dedicated hosting, a VPS hosting (a.k.a. a virtual server, or VPS), or even a dedicated hosting. Therefore, when selecting a web hosting distributor, you should also ponder about scalability, otherwise you might end up transferring your domain manually to a separate vendor, which can create site troubles and even extended downtime for your web page.