An explanation of web hosting
The most basic and universally availed of sort of web hosting is the shared web hosting service. It's a means to host your web site without having to understand much about programming and handling a web server. In addition, it's also the cheapest type of site hosting and it's in fact affordable for anybody. However, what is shared hosting?
What is shared website hosting?
As the name denotes, the shared website hosting service is a kind of service where multiple customers share the resources of the same hosting server. This implies that all web hosting server constituents like CPU, hard drives, RAM, network cards etc. are divided among the users whose accounts are on that very same web hosting server. This is mostly made feasible by creating separate accounts for the different customers and assigning certain limitations and usage quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are fixed so as to prevent the customers from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the web hosting server from overloading. Normally, shared web space hosting customers do not have root-level access to the server's config files, which primarily means that they cannot access anything else on the hosting server apart from their own website page hosting account. The site hosting features that each account may utilize are set by the hosting supplier that possesses the server and by the given web space hosting package. That results in the second vital question:
How are the shared web hosting servers divided among the users?
Hosting suppliers that supply shared web hosting accounts usually have various site hosting plans. Those packages provide diverse quotas of web space hosting resources and specifications, which in fact set the restrictions that a site hosting package will have. The client may select between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he deems will suit him best. The hosting package will then define what limitations the client's account will have, once set up. The prices and the specifications of the website hosting packages are determined by the actual web hosting distributor. Based on the policy of the vendor, the shared web space hosting service falls into 2 groups - the free hosting solution and the classic shared solution, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" vendors as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to judge, which one is more preferable, since they are quite different from each other and they actually are dependent on the business policy of the specific distributor and, of course, the demands of the particular user.
What is the difference between the free and the popular shared site hosting service?
Of course, the primary difference between the free and the paid solution is in the amount of features that they involve. Free web site hosting corporations are not able to maintain an enormous amount of hosting servers, hence, they simply accommodate more users on a single web hosting server by reducing the amount of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only in case the servers are kept under surveillance and administered appropriately, since the great amount of accounts may cause the server to crash frequently. The majority of the free web hosting vendors, however, ignore the quality of the service and therefore, it's quite hard to come across a free web space hosting service that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting companies usually offer free client support even to the free web hosting customers, because they want their web portals to enlarge so that they eventually migrate to a paid hosting plan, which offers more website hosting features. Such corporation, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and oldest free website hosting corporations worldwide.
At the same time, established shared web hosting suppliers like World Site Host, for instance, are able to maintain many hosting servers and hence, they may afford to provide much more feature-rich site hosting plans. Of course, that influences the cost of the webspace hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web site hosting plan, however, does not necessarily signify that this solution has a finer quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which offer a fee that corresponds to the actual service which you're obtaining. The top-notch web space hosting corporations that have been around for a long time are showing their price tags and package specifications in a realistic fashion, so that the customer may be aware of what indeed he is obtaining. Moreover, some of them offer a free bonus with the hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of charge-free templates that are provided by 'World Site Host'. Such webspace hosting distributors do worry about their good name and that's why if you go with them, you can be confident that you won't get fooled into buying a service that you cannot actually make use of.
What should I anticipate from a shared web space hosting service?
The shared site hosting solution is best for individuals who are looking to host a standard web portal, which is going to generate a small or medium amount of bandwidth each month. You cannot anticipate, though, that a shared web site hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business expands, your web site will become more and more resource consuming. Hence, you will have to eventually move to a more powerful hosting service like a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (a.k.a. a virtual web hosting server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when picking a web hosting company, you should also ponder about how they can be of service to you, otherwise you might end up migrating your domain name manually to a separate provider, which can cause site complications and even continuous downtime for your web page. Hence, choosing a website hosting supplier such as 'World Site Host', which can provide you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is essential and will spare you lots of difficulties in the future.