How Shared Hosting Functions

Shared hosting is a service that hosting suppliers provide so that you can get your web site online.

How can people observe your website?

When you create a site and you would like other people to spot it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to render the website discoverable online by shared hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting service providers offer you hard drive storage space for your web site on their powerful computers (web servers) and guarantee uninterrupted network connectivity. When someone writes your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a gaze at the content of your site.

Web hosting types

With the advancement of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to meet the different requirements of web site possessors, including shared hosting services, private virtual server web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single server is shared between numerous shared web hosting account holders who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't have to pay for the whole server in advance, as it is divided among numerous hosting users, and the hosting vendor can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting supplier handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other persons and if a given website becomes really busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other web sites on that server, but most web hosts, including us at JITTY, have security systems at work that prevent that from happening.

A definition of a hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most hosting distributors and web hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a great competition on the website hosting marketplace, most hosting providers endeavor to offer reasonable prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your funds. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free-of-charge domain registration.

VPS hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a VPS is an excellent choice. Virtual Private Server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS server web hosting account holders, but the hard drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your private virtual hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains an entire server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers a lot of customization options - the dedicated server hosting clients can choose the hardware and software specs that will match their demands. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is an excellent option for a heavy resource-absorbing corporate website, for example - you will not share the dedicated server's system resources with anyone else and will receive root privileges. You will have full authority over the hosting server, which will allow you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The setback of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical know-how is required - unless you hire an Information Technology expert, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated web server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also far more high-priced, since the cost of the physical machine isn't shared between any other users.

A hosting advice for novices

If you are just beginning to create your site and are seeking a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most reasonable choice. If your site grows beyond your shared web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your website files, since only the features of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining until expiration. In addition, if you finally reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has risen!), there always is the possibility to switch to a virtual private web server hosting platform or a dedicated server hosting solution without the need to swap hosting providers.