Description of Hosting

Hosting is a service that hosting companies offer so that you can get your site online.

How can people reach your site?

When you create a website and you want other individuals to access it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the site accessible on the web by 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 exist.

How does hosting work?

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

Hosting types

With the growth of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have emerged to satisfy the different needs of website owners, among them shared website hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most commonly used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single hosting server is shared between a lot of web hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and hosting server disk drive space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of hosting is generally cheaper - you don't need to buy the entire web hosting server in advance, as it is shared among plenty of hosting account owners, and the web hosting supplier can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting solutions provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The setback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other web hosting account holders and if one web site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but most web hosts, including us at Big D's Hosting Services, have security systems at work that prevent that from happening.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most common form of web hosting, the majority of hosting firms and hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the web hosting market, the majority of web hosting service providers try to offer affordable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, provide different web hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your budget. If you select the yearly invoicing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting plan, a virtual web hosting server is an appropriate option. virtual server web hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual server hosting customers, but the disk drive is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your VPS server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer gets an entire server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers tons of customization options - the dedicated server web hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specifications that will meet their requirements. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting plan is an excellent solution for a high resource-swallowing business portal, for example - you will not share the physical server's system resources with anyone else and will receive full server root privileges. You will have complete control over the hosting server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration changes that you might need. The downside of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is needed - unless you employ an IT specialist, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the physical server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more costly, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other users.

A web hosting tip for novices

If you are just beginning to create your site and are looking for a hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the best choice. If your site grows beyond your shared web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your data, since only the parameters of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular moment without having to worry about the time left until expiration. Also, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a Virtual Private Server web hosting solution or a dedicated web server hosting platform without having to swap hosting service providers.