How Does Shared Web Hosting Operate?

The most principal and widely availed of form of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It constitutes a way to host your web portal without having to understand much about programming and running a web hosting server. What's more, it's also the cheapest type of web hosting and it's indeed affordable for everybody. Nevertheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name signifies, the shared hosting service is a sort of service where a lot of customers share the system resources of the same web server. This indicates that all hosting server components such as CPU, hard disk drives, RAM, network cards and so on, are allocated among the users whose accounts are on that same server. This is usually made possible by opening separate accounts for the separate users and appointing specific limits and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are set in order to restrain the users from interfering with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the server from overloading. Usually, shared hosting customers do not have complete root-level access to the web hosting server's configuration files, which principally indicates that they do not have access to anything else on the web server but their very own hosting account. The web hosting resources that each account may use are fixed by the web hosting firm that owns the server and by the respective web hosting package. That leads to the second essential question:

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

Web hosting vendors that deliver shared hosting solutions usually have different hosting packages. Those packages involve diverse amounts of website hosting resources and specs, which actually fix the limitations that a web hosting plan will include. The user may select between the different web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will suit him best. The web hosting plan will then determine what limitations the customer's account will include, once set up. The costs and the specifications of the website hosting packages are fixed by the specific web hosting provider. Based on the policy of the company, the shared hosting solution can be divided into two groups - the free hosting solution and the normal shared solution, currently very famous among "cPanel hosting" companies as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to claim, which one is better, since they are very different from each other and they actually are subject to the marketing tactics of the particular company and, of course, the needs of the particular client.

What is the distinction between the free of cost and the standard shared hosting service?

Of course, the primary difference between the free and the paid solution is in the quantity of features that they include. Free web hosting companies are not capable of keeping a large amount of web servers, therefore, they just host more users on one single server by lowering the amount of resources offered by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the web hosting servers are kept under surveillance and maintained appropriately, since the large number of accounts may cause the hosting server to crash regularly. Most of the free website hosting distributors, however, overlook the quality of the service and hence, it's quite tough to come across a free web hosting solution that's in fact worth the effort. The top free hosting companies typically provide free client support even to the free web hosting customers, because they want their web portals to get bigger so that they eventually move to a paid hosting package, which includes more website hosting features. One such supplier, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and oldest free web hosting suppliers in the world.

At the same time, traditional shared hosting vendors such as us, are able to maintain a lot of web servers and hence, we may afford to offer much more feature-rich website hosting plans. Of course, that affects the cost of the web hosting packages. Paying a higher fee for a website hosting plan, however, does not necessarily imply that this solution has a better quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which involve a price that corresponds to the concrete service which you're obtaining. Moreover, we also give a free extra with the website hosting package, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of free website templates. As a website hosting distributor, we do worry about our reputation and that is the reason why if you choose us, you can rest confident that you won't get fooled into paying for a package that you cannot actually use.

What should I anticipate from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for people who desire to host a standard site, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of bandwidth every month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business gets bigger, your web page will become more and more demanding. Therefore, you will have to eventually migrate to a more feature-rich website hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated servers, a VPS hosting (also known as a private virtual web hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when selecting a hosting distributor, you should also consider scalability, otherwise you might end up transferring your domain manually to a separate company, which can cause website predicaments and even prolonged downtime for your website. If you go with Apt Web Hosting as your web hosting distributor, you can rest safe that we can present you with the required domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is crucial and will save you lots of nuisances in the future.