A definition of web hosting
The most elemental and commonly utilized form of web hosting is the shared web hosting solution. It represents a means to host your site without having to understand much about programming and running a web server. Besides, it's also the cheapest type of web space hosting and it's indeed affordable for anybody. Nonetheless, what is shared webspace hosting?
What is shared web space hosting?
As the name indicates, the shared web hosting solution is a kind of service where multiple customers share the system reserves of the same web server. This goes to say that all web hosting server components such as CPU, hard disk drives, RAM, network interface cards etc. are divided among the clients whose accounts are on that same server. This is usually made viable by opening separate accounts for the separate clients and imposing given limits and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are appointed in order to restrain the customers from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the hosting server from overloading. Usually, shared web space hosting clients do not have root access to the server's configuration files, which essentially signifies that they cannot access anything else on the server apart from their very own shared web hosting account. The web space hosting resources that each account may utilize are determined by the hosting supplier that owns the web server and by the given site hosting plan. That causes the second important question:
How are the shared hosting servers shared among the users?
Web hosting distributors that supply shared web site hosting accounts commonly have diverse website hosting plans. Those packages contain different quotas of hosting features and specifications, which actually fix the limits that a webspace hosting package will have. The customer may select between the different web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he deems will fit him best. The site hosting package will then define what restrictions the customer's account will have, once opened. The costs and the specifications of the website hosting packages are set by the given hosting vendor. Depending on the policy of the vendor, the shared hosting solution falls into 2 groups - the free hosting service and the classic shared solution, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" providers as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to declare, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they really are dependent on the marketing policy of the particular company and, of course, the demands of the particular user.
What is the contrast between the free and the regular shared web space hosting solution?
Of course, the chief difference between the free of cost and the paid solution is in the quantity of resources that they offer. Free web hosting suppliers are not capable of maintaining a huge amount of web servers, hence, they simply host more clients on one single hosting server by decreasing the quantity of system resources provided by the accounts. This will be effective only in case the hosting servers are kept under surveillance and dealt with properly, since the huge number of accounts may make the web server crash time and time again. The majority of the free hosting distributors, however, ignore the quality of the service and as a result, it's quite hard to stumble upon a free of charge web space hosting service that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting distributors usually provide free customer support even to the free website hosting clients, since they want their sites to enlarge so that they eventually move to a paid hosting plan, which offers more hosting features. Such corporation, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and eldest free web hosting distributors worldwide.
At the same time, established shared web hosting suppliers like GeeksCloud, for example, are able to maintain a lot of hosting servers and therefore, they may afford to provide much more feature-rich webspace hosting plans. Of course, that reflects on the cost of the site hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a web space hosting service, though, does not necessarily imply that this account has a better quality. The best solutions are the balanced ones, which offer a price that matches the real service which you're getting. The top web site hosting suppliers that have been around for a long time are displaying their prices and package configurations in a realistic fashion, so that the customer may acquainted with what indeed he is obtaining. Furthermore, some of these give a free bonus with the webspace hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by 100's of free-of-charge web design skins that are offered by 'GeeksCloud'. Such website hosting corporations do care about their good name and that is the reason why if you pick them, you can be assured that you won't get deceived into paying for a package that you cannot in fact utilize.
What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?
The shared web hosting solution is best for people who would like to host a normal website, which is going to utilize a small or medium amount of bandwidth every month. You cannot expect, though, that a shared web space hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business expands, your site will become more and more demanding. So, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich webspace hosting service such as a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (aka a virtual private web hosting server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when picking a hosting supplier, you should also consider how they can be of service to you, otherwise you might end up moving your domain name manually to a different supplier, which can create web site predicaments and even prolonged downtime for your web portal. Hence, selecting a web space hosting provider like 'GeeksCloud', which can provide you with the required domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is crucial and will spare you lots of headaches in the long run.