What Does Web Hosting Denote?

Web hosting is a service that web hosts offer so that you can get your web site online.

How can people visit your website?

When you set up a site and you wish other persons to view it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to render the site reachable online by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting vendors offer you disk storage space for your web site on their high-powered computers (servers) and guarantee constant network uptime. When someone types your domain (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can view the content of your site.

Web hosting varieties

With the advancement of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to match the various requirements of web site proprietors, among them shared hosting services, private virtual server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is shared between multiple shared hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server disk space quotas that they have been allotted. This form of web hosting is usually cheaper - you don't have to pay for the entire hosting server in advance, as it is divided among many web hosting customers, and the web hosting vendor can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting distributor takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other hosting clients and if a given site becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of hosting providers, including us at UNLI CLOUD, have protection platforms at work that impede that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting providers and web hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the web hosting market, most hosting providers endeavor to offer affordable prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free-of-cost domain registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a VPS server plan is an appropriate choice. VPS server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS hosting users, but the physical machine is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your VPS server, but it also calls for a higher degree of technical know-how.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire web hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most powerful of all web hosting solutions and offers loads of customization possibilities - the customers can select the hardware and software specifications that will meet their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting server is a perfect choice for a high resource-devouring corporate web site, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be given full server root access. You will have complete authority over the physical server, which will allow you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might require. The downside of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is needed - unless you hire an Information Technology specialist, it will be your duty to administer and configure the dedicated server. The dedicated hosting solution is also much more high-priced, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting tip for beginners

If you are just starting to set up your site and are searching for a web hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent option. If your website outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your website files, since only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular moment without having to worry about the remaining time before the expiration date. Moreover, if you finally reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it means that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to migrate to a VPS web hosting platform or a dedicated hosting web server without having to switch web hosting service providers.