How Website Hosting Operates

Website hosting is a service that hosting service providers offer so that you can put your web site on the World Wide Web.

How can people open your website?

When you build a site and you wish other individuals to visit it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to make the website available on the World Wide Web by website hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does website hosting work?

Hosting companies provide you with data storage space for your site on their powerful computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee constant Internet connectivity. When somebody writes your web site address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a peek at the content of your website.

Types of hosting

With the advancement of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to answer the different requirements of web site owners, among them shared website hosting services, virtual server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single server is divided between a lot of customers who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and web server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of hosting is normally less expensive - you don't have to pay for the entire web hosting server in advance, since it is divided among plenty of hosting clients, and the hosting solutions provider can afford to offer 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 supplier takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates for you.

The negative side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other clients and if one site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that web server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at Enterprise Technology, have security systems in place that prevent that from taking place.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting, the majority of hosting suppliers and hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge competition on the web hosting market, the majority of hosting providers endeavor to provide modest prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different web hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your funds. If you pick the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a present - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual hosting server package is an appropriate option. private virtual server web hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS server web hosting account holders, but the server is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual web hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the client gets an entire web server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of configuration possibilities - the dedicated web server hosting users can choose the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting package is an excellent choice for a heavy resource-requiring business web portal, for instance - you will not share the dedicated server's resources with anyone else and will be given root-level access. You will exercise complete control over the physical machine, which will permit you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical proficiency is required - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also much more costly, because the cost of the physical server isn't shared between any other clients.

A web hosting advice for novices

If you are just beginning to develop your web site and need a web hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most relevant option. If your website outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your files, because only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining before expiration. Additionally, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a virtual web server or a dedicated server without having to switch web hosting service providers.