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What Exactly is Hosting?

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Hosting is a service that web hosts provide so that you can put your web site on the Internet.

How can people spot your website?

When you create a site and you want other individuals to notice it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to render the web site visible online by hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Hosting distributors provide you with disk storage space for your site on their powerful computers (servers) and ensure constant Internet connectivity. When someone writes your domain (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can view the content of your site.

Web hosting types

With the advancement of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to satisfy the various expectations of website owners, among them shared website hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one web hosting server is divided between a lot of web hosting clients who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and web hosting server disk space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is normally cheaper - you don't have to buy the entire hosting server in advance, as it is shared between multiple web hosting users, and the web hosting services provider can afford to provide much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting supplier 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 hosting server's resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if one site becomes really popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that server, but the majority of web hosting companies, including us at City Website Services, have protection platforms at work that impede that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, most hosting distributors and hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the hosting market, the majority of hosting vendors endeavor to offer low prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your budget. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will receive a present - one charge-free domain registration.

VPS plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a private virtual web hosting server is a good solution. VPS server web hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other Virtual Private Server web hosting account owners, but the physical machine is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated 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 gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user gets a whole dedicated hosting web server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers lots of customization options - the dedicated hosting users can pick the hardware and software specifications that will meet their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting server is an excellent solution for a big corporate web site, for example - you will not share the physical machine's resources with anyone else and will receive full root-level access. You will exercise complete authority over the hosting server, which will permit you to make any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weak side of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical expertise is needed - unless you engage an Information Technology specialist, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also far more high-priced, since the cost of the server isn't shared among any other clients.

A web hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to set up your site and are seeking a web hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the best option. If your site grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular moment without worrying about the time left until the expiration date. Besides, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared web hosting plan and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated web server hosting solution without the need to change web hosting service providers.

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