What Precisely is Hosting?

Hosting is a service that hosting firms provide so that you can upload your web site to the web.

How can people find your website?

When you build a web site and you wish other people to access it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the web site discoverable on the Internet by hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why hosting services appeared.

How does hosting work?

Hosting distributors offer you space for your web site on their high-end computers (web servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet connectivity. When someone writes your web address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a peek at the content of your site.

Types of hosting

With the advance of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have appeared to fulfill the various requirements of website proprietors, including shared hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single server is shared among plenty of clients who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is generally cheaper - you don't have to purchase the whole server upfront, as it is divided among a lot of web hosting customers, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to provide much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting services provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The weak side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other individuals and if a given site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but most web hosting providers, including us at Innovative Hosting Solutions, have protection systems in place that impede that from happening.

A description of a web hosting service

Since shared hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, the majority of hosting vendors and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great competition on the website hosting market, most web hosting service providers endeavor to offer affordable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for example, offer different web hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your finances. If you choose the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free domain 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 hosting solution. If your site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting account, a VPS hosting server plan is an appropriate choice. VPS web server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS server hosting account owners, but the hard disk drive is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual private web server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your VPS web hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user obtains an entire physical machine and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers a multitude of customization possibilities - the dedicated web hosting clients can pick the hardware and software specifications that will match their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server is a perfect solution for a popular business site, for instance - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will be granted full root access. You will have complete authority over the web server, which will permit you to implement any configuration modifications that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical competence is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology professional, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the dedicated web hosting server isn't shared among any other clients.

A web hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to set up your web site and are seeking a hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most logical choice. If your website grows beyond your shared hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not necessitate migration of your files, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular moment without having to worry about the number of days left before expiration. Furthermore, if you finally reach the most advanced shared hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to switch to a VPS server or a dedicated hosting platform without needing to switch hosting providers.