Hosting Explanation

Hosting is a service that hosting firms provide so that you can get your web site online.

How can people observe your site?

When you develop a website and you want other persons to access it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to render the website available on the World Wide Web by hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting companies offer you disk space for your site on their powerful computers (web servers) and guarantee constant website availability. When somebody writes your domain name (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can take a peek at the content of your website.

Hosting varieties

With the advance of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have emerged to fulfill the different expectations of web site possessors, among them shared website hosting services, virtual server hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single web server is shared among numerous web hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, traffic and data space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is normally cheaper - you don't have to buy the entire server in advance, since it is shared among a lot of hosting clients, and the hosting provider can afford to provide much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The weak side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other hosting users and if a given website becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other websites on that web hosting server, but most web hosting service providers, including us at 123WebPlan, have security systems at work that obstruct that from happening.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of hosting companies and hosting users simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a large competition on the web hosting market, most web hosting companies strive to offer affordable prices and gifts with their services. We, for example, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your budget. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one charge-free domain name registration.

VPS services

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting plan, a VPS server package is a possible choice. private virtual server web hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server hosting clients, but the hard disk is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets an entire web server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers countless customization options - the dedicated server web hosting users can pick the hardware and software specifications that will answer their demands. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server hosting plan is a perfect solution for a high resource-swallowing corporate portal, for example - you will not share the dedicated web server's system resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with complete root-level access. You will exert complete control over the physical server, which will allow you to make any configuration modifications that you might need. The setback of the dedicated hosting solution is that a higher level of technical expertise is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology expert, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated hosting solution is also far more costly, because the cost of the physical machine isn't shared among any other customers.

A web hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your web site and are looking for a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent option. If your website grows beyond your web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your website files, since only the features of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the number of days left before expiration. Additionally, if you finally reach the most advanced shared hosting package and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a virtual hosting server or a dedicated web hosting platform without the need to change web hosting providers.