How Hosting Works

Hosting is a service that hosting companies provide so that you can upload your web site to the web.

How can people discern your site?

When you set up a website and you would like other people to observe it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to make the site visible online by hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why hosting services came into being.

How does hosting work?

Hosting firms provide you with disk storage space for your web site on their high-powered computers (web servers) and guarantee continuous service uptime. When somebody types your web address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can explore the content of your site.

Types of hosting

With the progress of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the different needs of website possessors, including shared hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web server is divided between lots of shared hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server disk storage space quotas that they have been allotted. This form of web hosting is generally less expensive - you don't need to purchase the entire server upfront, as it is divided between a lot of hosting clients, and the hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much more moderate prices. It is also much easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The negative side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other web hosting customers and if a given site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting companies, including us at Fiddyhost, have security systems at work that prevent that from occurring.

A definition of a hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most widely used form of web hosting, most hosting vendors and web hosting customers simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an extensive rivalry on the web hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting providers strive to provide modest prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your finances. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will get a gift - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS packages

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a virtual private web server plan is an appropriate option. Virtual Private Server web hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual web server hosting users, but the disk space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Package

With the Dedicated Package solution, the customer obtains a whole dedicated server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers plenty of customization options - the customers can select the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server web hosting package is an excellent option for a resource-absorbing business portal, for example - you will not share the dedicated hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with full server root privileges. You will exercise complete control over the web server, which will permit you to make any configuration modifications that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is required - unless you employ an IT specialist, it will be your duty to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also much more expensive, since the cost of the server isn't shared among any other users.

A website hosting tip for novices

If you are just beginning to develop your web site and are seeking a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most sensible choice. If your website outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the remaining time until the expiration date. What is more, if you finally reach the most powerful shared hosting package and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to migrate to a private virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated server hosting solution without having to change web hosting service providers.