How Does Shared Hosting Work?

The most fundamental and commonly availed of form of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It constitutes a way to host your web site without having to know much about programming and running a web hosting server. What's more, it's also the most economical type of web hosting and it's indeed affordable for everyone. Still, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name indicates, the shared hosting solution is a kind of service where many users share the system resources of the same web server. This means that all web server components like CPU, hard disks, RAM, NICs etc. are divided among the clients whose accounts are on that very same hosting server. This is mainly rendered attainable by opening different accounts for the different customers and allocating certain limitations and usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are fixed so as to restrain the customers from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the web hosting server from overloading. Usually, shared hosting users do not have full root access to the web server's configuration files, which primarily denotes that they cannot access anything else on the web hosting server but their own personal website hosting account. The web hosting resources that each account may avail of are fixed by the web hosting vendor that owns the hosting server and by the given website hosting package. That entails the second essential question:

How are the shared web hosting servers shared among the customers?

Web hosting corporations that provide shared hosting solutions normally have various web hosting plans. Those plans involve different quotas of website hosting resources and specs, which actually set the restrictions that a web hosting account will have. The customer may choose between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will fit him best. The website hosting plan will then define what limitations the client's account will include, once opened. The prices and the specs of the website hosting plans are defined by the given web hosting corporation. Depending on the politics of the corporation, the shared hosting service falls into two categories - the free hosting service and the common shared service, currently very famous among "cPanel hosting" traders as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to allege, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from each other and they really are dependent on the marketing tactics of the given provider and, of course, the demands of the specific user.

What is the distinction between the free and the common shared hosting service?

Of course, the primary difference between the free and the paid solution is in the quantity of resources that they include. Free website hosting suppliers are not able to maintain an immense number of hosting servers, hence, they just accommodate more clients on one single hosting server by reducing the amount of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only if the servers are monitored and administered properly, since the huge number of accounts may make the web hosting server crash regularly. The majority of the free web hosting firms, however, overlook the quality of the service and therefore, it's quite difficult to stumble upon a free of charge web hosting service that's in fact worth the effort. The top free hosting distributors usually offer free customer support even to the free website hosting customers, because they want their sites to enlarge so that they eventually move to a paid website hosting package, which includes more website hosting features. One such provider, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the biggest and oldest free website hosting providers in the world.

At the same time, traditional shared hosting firms like us, may afford to keep many servers and hence, we are able to provide much more powerful hosting packages. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a website hosting package, though, does not automatically imply that this solution has a finer quality. The best solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a price that corresponds to the concrete service which you're receiving. Furthermore, we also offer a free bonus with the website hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of complimentary web skins. As a web hosting corporation, we do look after our good name and this is the reason why if you choose us, you can be assured that you won't get swindled into purchasing a plan that you cannot actually make use of.

What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for those who would like to host a basic website, which is going to use a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business grows, your web page will become more and more demanding. Therefore, you will have to ultimately upgrade to a more powerful website hosting service like a semi-dedicated servers, a VPS hosting (aka a private virtual server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when selecting a website hosting supplier, you should also ponder about scalability, or else you might end up migrating your domain manually to a separate provider, which can cause web site problems and even continued downtime for your web page. If you pick Avarhost as your website hosting provider, you can rest safe that we can provide you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is vital and will spare you lots of hassles in the long run.