Web Hosting Services Defined

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

How can people find your website?

When you create a site and you would like other people to visit it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to render the site discoverable on the web by web hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why web hosting services exist.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting providers offer you disk drive storage space for your website on their high-powered computers (servers) and ensure uninterrupted network uptime. When somebody writes your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can take a look at the content of your site.

Web hosting varieties

With the growth of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to answer the various needs of website proprietors, including shared hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single server is shared among many hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is generally less expensive - you don't need to purchase the entire hosting server in advance, as it is shared among lots of hosting account holders, and the web hosting company can afford to provide much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting services provider takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other shared hosting account holders and if a given website becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that hosting server, but the majority of web hosting distributors, including us at SunsetHost, have security systems in place that impede that from happening.

A definition of a website hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most hosting service providers and web hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is a big competition on the website hosting market, the majority of hosting firms endeavor to offer moderate prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for example, offer different hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your finances. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will get a present - one free domain registration.

VPS hosting services

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a virtual web server plan is a possible option. VPS server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual web server hosting account holders, but the server is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS web server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your VPS server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the client gets an entire dedicated hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most flexible of all web hosting solutions and offers loads of configuration options - the dedicated hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specifications that will answer their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting server is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-requiring business portal, for example - you will not share the physical server's resources with anyone else and will receive complete server root access. You will exert complete control over the physical server, which will enable you to make any server configuration changes that you might need. The downside of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical expertise is required - unless you employ an IT specialist, it will be your responsibility to administer and configure the physical machine. The dedicated hosting solution also costs far more, since the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared between any other users.

A hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just starting to build your site and are seeking a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most appropriate choice. If your web site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your website files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any given moment without worrying about the remaining time before the expiration date. Also, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared web hosting plan and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to switch to a private virtual server web hosting platform or a dedicated server hosting platform without needing to swap hosting service providers.