How Shared Hosting Functions

Shared hosting is a service that companies provide so that you can publish your website on the World Wide Web.

How can people check out your web site?

When you build a web site and you wish other individuals to view it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to render the website accessible on the World Wide Web by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting corporations offer you hard drive space for your website on their high-power computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee constant website accessibility. When someone types your URL (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a glimpse at the content of your site.

Types of hosting

With the growth of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to fulfill the different needs of website possessors, among them shared web hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where a single web hosting server is shared between multiple shared web hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and hosting server disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't have to pay for the entire web hosting server upfront, since it is shared among a lot of hosting account owners, and the web hosting supplier can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting solutions provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The drawback of the shared hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other hosting clients and if a given website becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that web hosting server, but most web hosting providers, including us at Polonia Servers, have security systems at work that hinder that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting, the majority of hosting companies and web hosting users simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a big rivalry on the website hosting market, most hosting service providers endeavor to offer low prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your funds. If you choose the annual billing cycle, you will get a bonus - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a private virtual server plan is a suitable solution. VPS hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS web hosting clients, but the hard disk drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated web server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains a whole server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers loads of configuration possibilities - the dedicated server hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specs that will answer their needs. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-absorbing business web portal, for instance - you will not share the physical server's resources with anyone else and will gain root-level access. You will exercise complete authority over the physical machine, which will permit you to make any server configuration changes that you might need. The disadvantage of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical expertise is needed - unless you hire an IT pro, it will be your duty to manage and configure the dedicated web server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more expensive, because the cost of the server isn't shared among any other clients.

A web hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your website and are searching for a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared web hosting solution persists to be the wisest option. If your site grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your website files, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the number of days remaining before expiration. What is more, if you finally reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to move to a Virtual Private Server hosting platform or a dedicated hosting server without having to switch hosting service providers.