An explanation of site hosting
The most basic and widely used kind of web hosting is the shared web hosting service. It represents a way to host your web site without having to be much informed about programming and running a web server. In addition to this, it's also the cheapest type of hosting and it's very affordable for everyone. Still, what is shared site hosting?
What is shared hosting?
As the name implies, the shared website hosting service is a kind of service where lots of clients share the system reserves of the same web hosting server. This means that all web server elements such as CPU, hard disks, RAM, NICs etc. are split among the customers whose accounts are on that same server. This is usually made tenable by creating different accounts for the different clients and allocating given limits and quotas for each of them. Those limits are set in order to prevent the clients from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the server from overloading. Normally, shared web space hosting clients do not have complete root-level access to the hosting server's config files, which principally goes to say that they cannot access anything else on the web hosting server apart from their own shared website hosting account. The web page hosting features that each account may resort to are fixed by the hosting distributor that possesses the web server and by the particular website hosting package. That leads up to the second essential question:
How are the shared hosting servers split among the clients?
Web hosting vendors that distribute shared web hosting packages typically have different hosting plans. Those packages contain diverse quotas of site hosting resources and specifications, which in fact fix the limitations that a hosting account will include. The client may pick between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will befit him best. The web space hosting package will then define what limits the client's account will have, once opened. The prices and the specs of the webspace hosting packages are defined by the very web hosting firm. Based on the politics of the company, the shared site hosting solution falls into 2 groups - the free hosting solution and the classic shared service, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" firms as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to allege, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from each other and they actually are dependent on the marketing strategy of the given vendor and, of course, the needs of the specific user.
What is the distinction between the free of cost and the regular shared site hosting service?
Of course, the principal difference between the free of charge and the paid solution is in the quantity of resources that they contain. Free web hosting vendors are not capable of keeping an enormous number of web hosting servers, therefore, they simply host more customers on one web server by lowering the amount of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only in case the web hosting servers are supervised and handled properly, since the immense number of accounts may make the web server crash again and again. The majority of the free web space hosting providers, however, overlook the quality of the service and therefore, it's very hard to discover a free site hosting service that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting suppliers typically offer free customer support even to the free hosting users, since they want their websites to expand so that they subsequently move to a paid website hosting plan, which offers more webspace hosting resources. Such firm, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and eldest free web space hosting distributors worldwide.
On the other hand, established shared web hosting vendors like main, for example, are able to maintain many web servers and therefore, they may afford to offer much more feature-rich site hosting plans. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web space hosting package, however, does not automatically denote that this solution has a finer quality. The most optimal services are the balanced ones, which offer a fee that matches the actual service which you're receiving. The top web hosting distributors that have been around for quite a while are revealing their price tags and plan specs in a realistic way, so that the customer may familiar with what indeed he is obtaining. Besides, some of these give a free extra with the hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by 100's of complimentary site templates that are furnished by 'main'. Such web hosting providers do worry about their reputation and that is the reason why if you choose them, you can be assured that you won't get beguiled into paying for a package that you cannot in fact use.
What should I expect from a shared web page hosting solution?
The shared web hosting solution is best for individuals who want to host a basic web site, which is going to utilize a small or medium amount of traffic each month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared website hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business grows, your web page will become more and more demanding. So, you will have to eventually move to a more powerful web site hosting service such as a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (a.k.a. a virtual private web hosting server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when choosing a web site hosting vendor, you should also ponder about how they can be of service to you, or else you might end up migrating your domain name manually to a different provider, which can cause web site complications and even extended downtime for your web page. Therefore, choosing a web space hosting supplier such as 'main', which can present you with the required domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is vital and will spare you lots of frustrations in the future.