+1-855-211-0932 (ID:319770)
Don't have an account yet? Sign up now!

HomeHosting ArticlesHow Website Hosting Works
GetMore
Unlimited storage
Unlimited bandwidth
5 websites hosted
30-Day Free Trial
$3.92 / month

GetMorePlus
Unlimited storage
Unlimited bandwidth
Unlimited websites hosted
30-Day Free Trial
$8.67 / month

GetPro
Unlimited storage
Unlimited bandwidth
Unlimited websites hosted
30-Day Free Trial
$12.50 / month

How Website Hosting Works

Website hosting is a service that web hosting suppliers offer so that you can publish your web site on the Internet.

How can people check out your web site?

When you build a web site and you would like other persons to spot it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the web site available online by website hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why hosting services came into existence.

How does website hosting work?

Hosting companies offer you disk storage space for your site on their high-end computers (web servers) and guarantee constant service uptime. When someone types your web site address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can view the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the development of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to fulfill the different expectations of website owners, among them shared hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is shared between numerous web hosting customers who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and server hard disk space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of website hosting is normally cheaper - you don't have to buy the entire web hosting server in advance, as it is shared among a lot of users, and the hosting provider can afford to provide much lower prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other shared hosting account owners and if one web site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but most web hosting companies, including us at iHosting, have security systems at work that prevent that from occurring.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, most hosting companies and web hosting customers simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting firms endeavor to offer reasonable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, provide different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your resources. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will get a bonus - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting account, a private virtual web server package is a possible choice. Virtual Private Server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS web server hosting clients, but the hard disk space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual private web server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical know-how.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire web hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of customization options - the dedicated web server hosting customers can select the hardware and software specs that will meet their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server hosting plan is an excellent solution for a resource-consuming business web site, for instance - you will not share the hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full root-level access. You will exercise complete control over the physical machine, which will permit you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The drawback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical expertise is needed - unless you hire an IT professional, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the dedicated server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also much more costly, because the cost of the physical machine isn't shared between any other users.

A hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just beginning to develop your web site and are searching for a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the smartest option. If your web site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, 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 web hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular moment without worrying about the number of days left until expiration. What is more, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to move to a virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated server hosting solution without having to switch hosting service providers.