Web Hosting Services Unmasked

Web hosting is a service that web hosting suppliers provide so that you can upload your website to the World Wide Web.

How can people observe your web site?

When you set up a web site and you would like other individuals to observe it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to render the site visible online by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting corporations provide you with hard drive storage space for your site on their high-end computers (hosting servers) and guarantee continuous service uptime. When somebody writes your web site address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a glance at the content of your website.

Hosting types

With the advancement of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various requirements of website owners, including shared website hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one server is shared between multiple web hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is commonly less expensive - you don't need to pay for the entire hosting server in advance, as it is divided among plenty of web hosting account holders, and the hosting company can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting vendor handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other customers and if a given website becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that web hosting server, but most hosting firms, including us at nextlevelwebhost, have security systems at work that hinder that from happening.

A description of a web hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, the majority of hosting distributors and web hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a considerable rivalry on the web hosting market, the majority of hosting service providers endeavor to provide reasonable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your budget. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS hosting services

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a private virtual web hosting server plan is a possible option. VPS server web hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual web server hosting users, 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 an actual dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual web hosting server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual web server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire web server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers multiple customization options - the dedicated web server hosting users can choose the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their requirements. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting plan is a perfect choice for a resource-consuming corporate site, for instance - you will not share the web server's system resources with anyone else and will be given complete root access. You will exert full control over the server, which will enable you to implement any configuration changes that you might need. The setback of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical competence is needed - unless you engage an IT professional, it will be your duty to administer and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also much more costly, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just beginning to set up your site and are seeking a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent choice. If your web site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your data, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more advanced one at any given time without having to worry about the time left before the expiration date. What is more, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to migrate to a virtual web server or a dedicated web hosting solution without the need to switch hosting providers.