What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a service that web hosting vendors provide so that you can upload your website online.

How can people spot your site?

When you make a site and you would like other individuals to notice it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to make the website available on the web by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting firms provide you with disk drive storage space for your web site on their powerful computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet access. When someone writes your domain (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a peek at the content of your website.

Hosting varieties

With the growth of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have emerged to match the various expectations of website possessors, including shared hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single web server is divided between multiple hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of web hosting is typically less expensive - you don't need to pay for the entire hosting server in advance, as it is shared among many web hosting customers, and the web hosting distributor can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting solutions provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other web hosting customers and if a given website becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other web sites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting firms, including us at Ameriline Hosting, have protection platforms in place that hinder that from taking place.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most widely used form of web hosting, most web hosting firms and hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the hosting market, most web hosting service providers strive to offer affordable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, provide different hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your resources. If you pick the yearly invoicing cycle, you will receive a gift - one charge-free domain registration.

VPS hosting services

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual private web hosting server plan is an excellent option. virtual server web hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual server web hosting users, but the server is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the client obtains an entire physical machine and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers countless customization options - the clients can select the hardware and software specs that will meet their requirements. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting server is a perfect choice for a resource-intensive corporate website, for example - you will not share the physical machine's system resources with anyone else and will get full server root access. You will exert full authority over the physical server, which will permit you to make any configuration changes that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is needed - unless you engage an IT pro, it will be your duty to manage and configure the server. The dedicated server hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared among any other clients.

A web hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just starting to set up your site and need a website hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most appropriate choice. If your web site grows beyond your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular moment without worrying about the remaining time before expiration. In addition, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to migrate to a private virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution without the need to change web hosting service providers.