Web Hosting Explained

Web hosting is a service that web hosting vendors offer so that you can publish your site on the World Wide Web.

How can people access your website?

When you build a site and you wish other people to visit it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the website available on the Internet by web 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 exist.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting service providers provide you with hard drive space for your site on their powerful computers (servers) and guarantee constant Internet access. 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 web hosting server where they can examine the content of your website.

Types of web hosting

With the advancement of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to answer the various expectations of web site proprietors, among them shared web hosting services, private virtual server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where a single web hosting server is divided among plenty of hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web server storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of web hosting is generally cheaper - you don't need to pay for the entire server upfront, as it is shared among lots of hosting account holders, and the hosting services provider can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting solutions provider handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The weakness of the shared hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other shared hosting account owners and if one website becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that server, but the majority of web hosting service providers, including us at Web Host Miami, have security systems in place that prevent that from taking place.

A definition of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most web hosting service providers and hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the hosting marketplace, most web hosting vendors endeavor to offer low prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will receive a gift - one charge-free domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual server web hosting plan is an appropriate option. private virtual server web hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS hosting account owners, but the hard disk is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated 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 Virtual Private Server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the client obtains an entire hosting server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers a lot of configuration options - the customers can pick the hardware and software specs that will meet their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated server hosting plan is a perfect solution for a resource-swallowing corporate portal, for example - you will not share the dedicated hosting web server's resources with anyone else and will gain full server root access. You will have complete authority over the web hosting server, which will allow you to make any configuration changes that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical know-how is required - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your duty to administer and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also far more high-priced, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other clients.

A website hosting tip for novices

If you are just beginning to set up your site and need a web hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most sensible option. If your website grows beyond your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not necessitate migration of your files, since 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 worrying about the remaining time before the expiration date. Also, if you finally reach the most powerful shared hosting package and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your website's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to move to a VPS server web hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution without needing to swap hosting service providers.