How Does Hosting Operate?

Hosting is a service that web hosting companies offer so that you can put your website on the World Wide Web.

How can people see your website?

When you set up a site and you would like other people to check it out, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to render the web site reachable on the World Wide Web by hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why web hosting services came into being.

How does hosting work?

Hosting companies provide you with hard drive space for your site on their powerful computers (web hosting servers) and ensure constant Internet connection. When someone types your website address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a glimpse at the content of your web site.

Types of web hosting

With the progress of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to match the different needs of website proprietors, among them shared website hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated server web 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 web hosting server is divided among multiple users who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and disk drive space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't have to buy the entire web hosting server upfront, since it is shared among lots of web hosting account holders, and the web hosting distributor can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting solutions provider takes care of all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The disadvantage of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other users and if one site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that server, but the majority of hosting distributors, including us at Quiyada Website Services, have protection platforms at work that prevent that from happening.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of hosting service providers and hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a large rivalry on the hosting market, the majority of hosting firms endeavor to offer modest prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you choose the annual billing cycle, you will get a gift - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS services

VPS is an acronym 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 web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a private virtual server plan is a good option. Virtual Private Server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual private web server hosting account owners, but the disk drive space 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 server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced level of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client obtains a whole physical machine and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most powerful of all web hosting solutions and offers a myriad of customization possibilities - the users can select the hardware and software specifications that will match their demands. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting server is an excellent solution for a resource-demanding business website, for example - you will not share the hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will get complete root-level access. You will have complete authority over the physical machine, which will allow you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a higher level of technical proficiency is needed - unless you employ an IT pro, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the physical server isn't shared between any other users.

A web hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just starting to develop your web site and need a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most appropriate option. If your website 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, because only the features of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the remaining time until the expiration date. Moreover, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to switch to a private virtual web server or a dedicated web hosting solution without needing to switch web hosting providers.