How Web Hosting Services Works

Web hosting is a service that companies provide so that you can get your site online.

How can people spot your site?

When you build a site and you wish other people to see it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to render the website accessible on the web by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting providers provide you with data storage space for your web site on their high-power computers (hosting servers) and ensure continuous Internet connection. When somebody types your web site address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a glance at the content of your website.

Types of hosting

With the growth of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the various demands of web site owners, among them shared hosting services, Virtual Private Server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single hosting server is shared among numerous web hosting clients who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and web server disk drive storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is generally cheaper - you don't have to pay for the entire web hosting server in advance, as it is divided between multiple web hosting customers, and the hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much more modest prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The weak side of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other users and if one website becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that web server, but most hosting suppliers, including us at Iwindows, have security platforms in place that obstruct that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of hosting providers and web hosting users simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting service providers try to offer low prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your budget. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will receive a present - one free-of-cost domain registration.

VPS hosting services

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting account, a Virtual Private Server is a suitable solution. VPS hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual server web hosting customers, but the disk drive space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated web server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private web server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your Virtual Private Server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire web server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers countless customization possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting users can choose the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is an excellent option for a resource-requiring business portal, for instance - you will not share the server's resources with anyone else and will obtain full server root access. You will have full control over the physical server, which will permit you to make any configuration modifications that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated server web hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical competence is needed - unless you hire an IT pro, it will be your duty to manage and configure the server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated web hosting server isn't shared between any other clients.

A website hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your web site and are seeking a web hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the best option. If your website grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your files, because only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the remaining time before the expiration date. Besides, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared hosting package and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a private virtual web server or a dedicated hosting server without having to switch web hosting providers.