Shared Website Hosting Unveiled

The most elemental and popularly availed of type of web hosting is the hosting service. It's a means to host your web site without having to know much about programming and handling a web hosting server. In addition, it's also the cheapest form of website hosting and it's quite affordable for everyone. Still, what is hosting?

What is hosting?

As the name designates, the hosting service is a form of service where many users share the resources of one and the same web server. This denotes 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 web hosting server. This is usually made viable by creating different accounts for the separate customers and fixing specific limits and quotas for each of them. Those limitations are set so as to restrain the customers from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the web server from overburdening. Normally, hosting users do not have root-level access to the web server's config files, which basically indicates that they do not have access to anything else on the web hosting server beside their very own hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may utilize are determined by the hosting distributor that owns the server and by the given web hosting package. That leads to the second vital question:

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

Web hosting firms that supply hosting services commonly have diverse website hosting plans. Those packages contain different quotas of web hosting resources and specs, which in fact set the limits that a web hosting account will include. The user may pick between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will fit him best. The website hosting plan will then determine what limitations the customer's account will involve, once set up. The prices and the specifications of the web hosting plans are fixed by the given web hosting company. Depending on the politics of the distributor, the hosting service can be divided into 2 groups - the free hosting service and the standard shared solution, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" suppliers as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to say, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from each other and they indeed depend on the marketing tactics of the specific company and, of course, the needs of the specific customer.

What is the distinction between the free and the standard hosting solution?

Of course, the major difference between the free and the paid solution is in the amount of resources that they offer. Free web hosting suppliers are not capable of keeping a huge amount of web hosting servers, hence, they merely accommodate more customers on a single server by lowering the amount of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the web servers are kept under surveillance and dealt with appropriately, since the big number of accounts may cause the server to crash frequently. The majority of the free website hosting corporations, though, neglect the quality of the service and as a result, it's very difficult to discover a free of cost hosting service that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting companies commonly offer free customer support even to the free web hosting clients, since they want their web pages to expand so that they subsequently upgrade to a paid web hosting account, which offers more web hosting resources. One such firm, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the biggest and oldest free web hosting firms worldwide.

On the other hand, traditional hosting firms like us, are able to maintain many hosting servers and hence, we are able to provide much more powerful website hosting packages. Of course, that influences the cost of the web hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a web hosting solution, though, does not necessarily mean that this account has a finer quality. The most advantageous services are the balanced ones, which involve a fee that corresponds to the concrete service which you're obtaining. In addition, we also offer a free extra with the website hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of free web skins. As a website hosting supplier, we do worry about our reputation and that is the reason why if you choose us, you can rest certain that you won't get fooled into buying a package that you cannot in fact use.

What should I anticipate from a hosting solution?

The hosting service is best for those who want to host a standard web page, which is going to utilize a small or medium amount of traffic each month. You cannot expect, however, that a hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business grows, your site will become more and more demanding. So, you will have to ultimately upgrade to a more feature-rich web hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated servers, a VPS (also known as a private virtual web server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when choosing a web hosting company, you should also reflect about scalability, otherwise you might end up transferring your domain manually to a different vendor, which can create site problems and even continuous downtime for your web site. If you select Merlin Internet Services as your web hosting company, you can rest safe that we can present you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is essential and will save you lots of frustrations in the long run.