What Actually is Web Hosting

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

How can people view your website?

When you set up a site and you would like other individuals to see it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the site accessible on the World Wide Web by web hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting corporations offer you disk storage space for your website on their powerful computers (hosting servers) and guarantee uninterrupted network uptime. When someone writes your website address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can take a peek at the content of your web site.

Types of hosting

With the progress of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to answer the different demands of web site owners, among them shared web hosting services, Virtual Private Server web hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single web server is shared among a lot of web hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of web hosting is generally less expensive - you don't need to buy the whole web hosting server upfront, since it is shared among plenty of hosting account owners, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting solutions provider takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The setback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if a given site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at Social Stream ME, have protection platforms in place that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a website hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, the majority of hosting firms and web hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of hosting companies try to offer affordable prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a present - one free domain name registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual server hosting package is an excellent choice. private virtual server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS hosting account holders, but the hard disk 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 web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private web hosting server are not shared. Also, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the client obtains an entire web server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers countless configuration possibilities - the dedicated server hosting customers can select the hardware and software specifications that will answer their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting plan is an excellent solution for a high resource-swallowing corporate web site, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with complete root-level access. You will have full control over the machine, which will permit you to make any server configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical expertise is needed - unless you engage an Information Technology expert, it will be your responsibility to administer and configure the dedicated server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other customers.

A website hosting advice for novices

If you are just beginning to create your site and are searching for a hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution remains the wisest choice. If your site grows beyond your hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the time left before expiration. What is more, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your site's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to switch to a virtual private web server or a dedicated web hosting platform without the need to switch web hosting providers.