Web Hosting Unmasked

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

How can people notice your web site?

When you develop a website and you wish other persons to access it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the web site reachable on the Internet by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting service providers offer you storage space for your site on their high-powered computers (web hosting servers) and ensure constant network uptime. When someone types your domain name (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a gaze at the content of your web site.

Web hosting types

With the advance of Internet technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the various expectations of web site owners, among them shared web hosting services, VPS server web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is divided among many shared hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is normally cheaper - you don't have to purchase the whole server upfront, as it is divided between many web hosting account holders, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much cheaper prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting services provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if a given web site becomes really busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that web server, but most hosting providers, including us at Flowers Technologies, have security systems at work that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most commonly used type of web hosting, most web hosting companies and hosting customers simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the web hosting market, the majority of web hosting companies strive to provide low prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared web hosting account, a virtual hosting server plan is a good option. virtual server web hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS server web hosting account owners, but the disk drive is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your VPS web server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical know-how.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire dedicated hosting web server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most flexible of all hosting solutions and offers numerous configuration options - the dedicated web hosting clients can pick the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web server hosting package is a perfect choice for a high resource-absorbing business website, for example - you will not share the dedicated hosting web server's resources with anyone else and will obtain complete server root access. You will exert full control over the web server, which will permit you to implement any configuration changes that you might need. The disadvantage of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is needed - unless you engage an IT pro, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the physical machine. The dedicated server hosting solution also costs much more, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared among any other users.

A website hosting recommendation for beginner users

If you are just starting to set up your website and need a hosting solution to start with, the shared web hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent choice. If your web site outgrows your shared web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your web site files, since only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining before the expiration date. Moreover, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still require more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has risen!), there always is the possibility to switch to a VPS web server or a dedicated web server hosting platform without having to change web hosting service providers.