Hosting Description

Hosting is a service that web hosting providers offer so that you can put your site on the Internet.

How can people access your web site?

When you make a website and you want other people to observe it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to render the website reachable on the World Wide Web by hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why web hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting service providers offer you hard disk storage space for your website on their powerful computers (hosting servers) and ensure uninterrupted website availability. When someone types your URL (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a peek at the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the advancement of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have appeared to fulfill the different requirements of web site possessors, including shared website hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is shared between lots of hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server disk drive storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is typically less expensive - you don't need to buy the whole web hosting server upfront, since it is divided between lots of customers, and the hosting supplier can afford to provide much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the hosting solutions provider takes care of all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The setback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other clients and if one web site becomes really busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other web sites on that web hosting server, but most hosting suppliers, including us at Sharplogics, have security platforms at work that prevent that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most hosting suppliers and hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the website hosting marketplace, the majority of hosting firms try to offer reasonable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, offer different hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your finances. If you select the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a present - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS 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 web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a virtual private web server package is a suitable option. private virtual server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual web server hosting users, but the server is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also calls for a higher degree of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains a whole dedicated hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers lots of configuration possibilities - the dedicated hosting clients can choose the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting package is a perfect option for a large business web site, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will get complete server root access. You will exert complete control over the web server, which will allow you to implement any configuration changes that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical proficiency is required - unless you employ an IT professional, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated server hosting solution also costs far more, since the cost of the physical server isn't shared among any other clients.

A web hosting advice for beginners

If you are just starting to create your site and are seeking a hosting solution to commence with, the shared hosting solution remains the most suitable option. If your site outgrows your website 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 website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without having to worry about the remaining time until the expiration date. Additionally, if you finally reach the most powerful shared website 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 migrate to a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated web server without the need to switch web hosting service providers.