What Actually is Shared Hosting?

The most fundamental and popularly utilized type of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It's a means to host your web site without having to understand much about programming and administrating a web hosting server. Moreover, it's also the most inexpensive form of web hosting and it's very affordable for anybody. Nevertheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name designates, the shared hosting service is a type of service where many clients share the system resources of the same server. This means that all server elements like CPU, hard disks, RAM, NICs and so on, are shared among the users whose accounts are on that same web server. This is mainly rendered possible by creating separate accounts for the separate users and setting certain limits and usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are appointed in order to hinder the customers from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the hosting server from overburdening. Normally, shared hosting users do not have root access to the hosting server's configuration files, which principally signifies that they cannot access anything else on the web server aside from their very own web hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may resort to are fixed by the hosting corporation that possesses the web server and by the given hosting plan. That paves the way for the second essential question:

How are the shared web hosting servers shared among the users?

Web hosting suppliers that furnish shared hosting packages normally have diverse website hosting packages. Those plans offer diverse quotas of website hosting features and specs, which actually determine the limitations that a web hosting package will include. The user may select between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will fit him best. The web hosting package will then determine what restrictions the customer's account will include, once opened. The prices and the specs of the website hosting plans are set by the actual web hosting distributor. Depending on the politics of the distributor, the shared hosting solution falls into 2 groups - the free hosting service and the normal shared service, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" providers as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to affirm, which one is better, since they are very different from each other and they really are dependent on the business policy of the specific vendor and, of course, the demands of the given customer.

What is the contrast between the free of cost and the regular shared hosting service?

Of course, the essential difference between the free of charge and the paid solution is in the quantity of resources that they include. Free hosting vendors are not able to keep an immense amount of web servers, hence, they merely host more users on one single server by reducing the quantity of resources offered by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the servers are kept under surveillance and handled properly, since the great amount of accounts may causer the web server to crash on a regular basis. Most of the free web hosting distributors, though, neglect the quality of the service and hence, it's very hard to stumble upon a free of charge website hosting solution that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting distributors commonly provide free client support even to the free website hosting clients, since they want their web pages to expand so that they subsequently migrate to a paid website hosting package, which offers more website hosting features. Such vendor, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and eldest free web hosting firms worldwide.

At the same time, established shared hosting providers like us, may afford to maintain plenty of web hosting servers and so, we are able to offer much more powerful web hosting packages. Of course, that influences the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher fee for a website hosting account, though, does not automatically denote that this package has a better quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which offer a price that corresponds to the real service which you're getting. What's more, we also provide a free extra with the website hosting package, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of complimentary design themes. As a web hosting provider, we do care about our reputation and that's why if you choose us, you can be certain that you won't get hoaxed into buying a plan that you cannot actually utilize.

What should I expect from a shared hosting service?

The shared hosting service is best for people who desire to host a standard web portal, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business grows, your site will become more and more resource consuming. Hence, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich hosting service like a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (aka a virtual private web hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when selecting a website hosting vendor, you should also reflect about scalability, or else you might end up transferring your domain manually to a separate company, which can bring about site predicaments and even extended downtime for your website. If you pick St. Clare Web Hosting as your hosting provider, you can rest safe that we can present you with the required domain name and hosting services as you grow, is essential and will save you a lot of problems in the long run.