A description of web hosting
The most principal and universally availed of kind of web hosting is the shared web hosting service. It constitutes a way to host your web page without having to be much informed about programming and handling a server. What's more, it's also the most inexpensive type of site hosting and it's in fact affordable for everybody. However, what is shared web space hosting?
What is shared webspace hosting?
As the name denotes, the shared site hosting service is a type of service where lots of clients share the resources of the same web hosting server. This signifies that all web server constituents like CPU, hard disk drives, RAM, network cards etc. are shared among the clients whose accounts are on that same hosting server. This is mostly rendered feasible by creating different accounts for the different users and appointing certain limitations and quotas for each of them. Those limits are imposed in order to prevent the users from interfering with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the web server from overloading. Usually, shared webspace hosting users do not have root access to the server's configuration files, which principally goes to say that they cannot access anything else on the server aside from their own personal shared hosting account. The web space hosting features that each account may resort to are determined by the web hosting firm that owns the web hosting server and by the given site hosting package. That entails the second vital question:
How are the shared web hosting servers shared among the clients?
Hosting providers that deliver shared site hosting solutions typically have different site hosting packages. Those packages offer diverse amounts of web space hosting resources and specifications, which in fact determine the restrictions that a hosting package will have. The customer may choose between the different web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will fit him best. The website hosting package will then define what restrictions the customer's account will include, once created. The costs and the specs of the web site hosting packages are determined by the actual web hosting company. Based on the policy of the supplier, the shared webspace hosting service can be divided into 2 categories - the free hosting solution and the classic shared solution, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" providers as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to judge, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from one another and they really depend on the business tactics of the given supplier and, of course, the demands of the given user.
What is the difference between the free of cost and the typical shared website hosting service?
Of course, the major difference between the free and the paid service is in the quantity of resources that they include. Free webspace hosting suppliers are not capable of keeping a great number of web servers, therefore, they simply accommodate more users on one single server by reducing the quantity of system resources provided by the accounts. This will be efficient only in case the web hosting servers are supervised and administered appropriately, since the enormous amount of accounts may make the server crash over and over again. Most of the free website hosting companies, however, ignore the quality of the service and therefore, it's very difficult to find a free web site hosting service that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting firms commonly offer free customer support even to the free web space hosting clients, because they want their web pages to grow so that they eventually migrate to a paid web site hosting plan, which includes more website hosting features. Such corporation, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and eldest free hosting distributors worldwide.
On the other hand, established shared web hosting providers such as AfterHost, for example, are able to keep a lot of web hosting servers and as a result, they may afford to offer much more feature-rich web space hosting packages. Of course, that affects the cost of the web site hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a hosting solution, however, does not automatically denote that this account has a better quality. The best solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a fee that corresponds to the actual service which you're obtaining. The first-rate web hosting corporations that have been around for quite a while are displaying their price tags and package specifications in an objective fashion, so that the customer may acquainted with what in fact he is receiving. In addition, some of these provide a free bonus with the web site hosting plan, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of free web site themes that are supplied by 'AfterHost'. Such website hosting distributors do worry about their reputation and that's why if you pick them, you can be assured that you won't get hoaxed into paying for a package that you cannot actually avail of.
What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?
The shared website hosting service is best for people who want to host a standard web page, which is going to swallow a small or medium amount of traffic every month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared web site hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business grows, your web portal will become more and more demanding. Hence, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich web site hosting service such as a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (aka a private virtual hosting server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when picking a web space hosting provider, you should also reflect about how they can be of service to you, or else you might end up transferring your domain name manually to a separate supplier, which can create website problems and even extended downtime for your web portal. Therefore, selecting a website hosting distributor such as 'AfterHost', which can present you with the required domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is crucial and will spare you a lot of problems in the future.