How Shared Hosting Operates

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting vendors provide so that you can put your website on the web.

How can people view your web site?

When you develop a web site and you wish other people to discern it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to make the website accessible on the World Wide Web by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting firms provide you with hard drive storage space for your web site on their high-power computers (web servers) and ensure uninterrupted website availability. When someone types your domain name (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your site.

Hosting varieties

With the progress of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the various demands of website owners, including shared website hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one hosting server is divided among numerous clients who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and web server hard disk space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of web hosting is generally cheaper - you don't have to buy the whole hosting server upfront, as it is shared among a lot of web hosting clients, and the web hosting vendor can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting company takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The negative side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other web hosting clients and if one site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web server, but most hosting providers, including us at Zhaku.com, have security systems at work that impede that from occurring.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, the majority of hosting suppliers and hosting customers simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a large competition on the web hosting marketplace, most web hosting companies try to offer modest prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for example, provide different hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one charge-free domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a virtual web hosting server is a suitable option. virtual private web server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other Virtual Private Server hosting customers, but the physical server is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web hosting server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your Virtual Private Server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains a whole web hosting server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers lots of customization possibilities - the customers can pick the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is an excellent solution for a frequently visited corporate portal, for example - you will not share the dedicated web server's system resources with anyone else and will obtain root-level access. You will have full authority over the web hosting server, which will permit you to make any configuration modifications that you might require. The downside of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical competence is needed - unless you hire an Information Technology expert, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also much more high-priced, because the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared among any other users.

A web hosting recommendation for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your web site and need a hosting solution to start with, the shared hosting solution remains the most appropriate choice. If your website outgrows your shared web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your files, because only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your hosting package to a more advanced one at any particular moment without having to worry about the time left before expiration. Also, if you finally reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to move to a VPS hosting solution or a dedicated hosting solution without the need to swap hosting providers.