Web Hosting Description

Web hosting is a service that companies offer so that you can put your site on the web.

How can people notice your site?

When you build a site and you want other persons to observe it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to make the web site available on the web by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting companies provide you with hard disk storage space for your web site on their high-end computers (hosting servers) and ensure continuous service uptime. When someone types your website address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a gaze at the content of your site.

Web hosting varieties

With the growth of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to satisfy the various needs of website owners, including shared website hosting services, private virtual server web hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is shared between many web hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and disk drive storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is normally less expensive - you don't have to buy the whole hosting server upfront, since it is shared between multiple web hosting customers, and the web hosting services provider can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other hosting users and if one site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other web sites on that server, but most web hosting firms, including us at MicrosolutionsConsulting.com, have security systems in place that impede that from occurring.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, the majority of web hosts and web hosting clients simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a considerable competition on the web hosting market, the majority of hosting providers endeavor to provide modest prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your finances. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a gift - one free domain name registration.

VPS hosting plans

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

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire dedicated web server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers lots of customization possibilities - the dedicated server hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specifications that will match their requirements. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server hosting package is an excellent option for a heavy resource-devouring business web portal, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will get complete root-level access. You will exert full authority over the hosting server, which will allow you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might require. The setback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is required - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your duty to manage and configure the physical machine. The dedicated hosting solution is also much more expensive, because the cost of the server isn't shared among any other users.

A website hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just starting to build your website and are seeking a web hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most logical choice. If your web site grows beyond your shared hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the features of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the number of days left until the expiration date. Also, if you finally reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your web site's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to move to a VPS or a dedicated server web hosting platform without having to change web hosting providers.