What Actually is Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a service that web hosts offer so that you can get your website online.

How can people discern your website?

When you develop a site and you would like other persons to notice it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to make the site discoverable online by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting vendors provide you with hard drive space for your web site on their high-powered computers (web hosting servers) and ensure uninterrupted website availability. When somebody writes your domain name (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can examine the content of your website.

Web hosting types

With the advancement of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to answer the various requirements of website owners, among them shared web hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web server is shared between lots of customers who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and web content space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of website hosting is typically less expensive - you don't need to purchase the entire web hosting server in advance, as it is shared between multiple clients, and the hosting solutions provider can afford to provide much more modest prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting services provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other persons and if one site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting companies, including us at MEDHA4U.COM, have protection systems at work that prevent that from happening.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, most web hosting service providers and web hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a considerable competition on the website hosting marketplace, most hosting service providers strive to offer cheap prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for example, provide different hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you choose the yearly billing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free domain name registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting account, a VPS server hosting plan is a suitable solution. virtual web server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS server web hosting users, but the disk drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization technology offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets a whole web hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most robust of all hosting solutions and offers numerous customization possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting clients can choose the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web server is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-demanding business portal, for example - you will not share the physical machine's resources with anyone else and will acquire root access. You will exercise complete authority over the physical server, which will enable you to make any configuration changes that you might need. The disadvantage of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical proficiency is required - unless you employ an Information Technology pro, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the physical machine. The dedicated web server hosting solution also costs far more, since the cost of the physical server isn't shared among any other clients.

A web hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just beginning to build your web site and are looking for a website hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most relevant option. If your web site grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your data, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the remaining time until the expiration date. In addition, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to switch to a VPS web hosting solution or a dedicated web hosting platform without needing to switch web hosting providers.