How Does Shared Hosting Function?

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

How can people find your site?

When you make a site and you wish other people to notice it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to make the site visible online by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does shared hosting work?

Web hosting companies provide you with content storage space for your website on their high-powered computers (web servers) and guarantee continuous website accessibility. When someone writes your domain (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 have a look at the content of your site.

Web hosting types

With the advance of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to satisfy the different expectations of web site owners, including shared web hosting services, VPS web server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one web hosting server is divided between many clients who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and web content storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of website hosting is usually cheaper - you don't have to purchase the entire hosting server upfront, as it is shared among plenty of hosting clients, and the web hosting company can afford to provide much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The setback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other shared hosting account owners and if one web site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that web server, but most hosting firms, including us at WebLakay, have security platforms at work that hinder that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, most hosting service providers and web hosting customers simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a large competition on the website hosting marketplace, most web hosting vendors try to provide affordable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, provide different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will receive a present - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

Virtual private servers packages

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a virtual web hosting server is an excellent choice. virtual server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS hosting customers, but the hard drive space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual web hosting server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS web server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user obtains a whole hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of customization possibilities - the dedicated web hosting clients can select the hardware and software specifications that will meet their requirements. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated server is a perfect option for a resource-swallowing corporate portal, for instance - you will not share the physical machine's resources with anyone else and will receive full server root privileges. You will have full control over the web server, which will allow you to implement any configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is needed - unless you engage an Information Technology expert, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the dedicated web server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more high-priced, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared among any other clients.

A hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just starting to develop your site and are seeking a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most relevant choice. If your website outgrows your hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular time without worrying about the number of days left before the expiration date. In addition, if you finally reach the most powerful shared website hosting package and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it means that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to switch to a VPS web hosting server or a dedicated hosting server without the need to switch web hosting service providers.