Web Hosting Explanation

Web hosting is a service that hosting providers provide so that you can put your site on the web.

How can people discover your website?

When you build a web site and you want other individuals to access it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to render the site available on the World Wide Web by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting providers provide you with storage space for your web site on their high-power computers (hosting servers) and guarantee constant network uptime. When somebody writes your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can take a look at the content of your web site.

Hosting types

With the growth of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various demands of web site proprietors, including shared website hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is shared among plenty of web hosting customers who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and content storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of web hosting is generally cheaper - you don't need to pay for the entire hosting server in advance, since it is divided among numerous hosting clients, and the hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much lower prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the hosting supplier takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The negative side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other individuals and if one website becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at STEERWEB, have protection platforms at work that hinder that from happening.

A definition of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most web hosting distributors and web hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is a considerable competition on the website hosting market, most web hosting vendors endeavor to provide modest prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you choose the yearly billing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one charge-free domain name registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a VPS web hosting package is an excellent choice. VPS server web hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual server hosting customers, but the physical server is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a real dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization technology offers you much more autonomy to configure your VPS hosting server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer gets a whole hosting server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most flexible of all hosting solutions and offers a myriad of customization options - the dedicated web server hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will match their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting web server is an excellent option for a heavy resource-swallowing corporate site, for example - you will not share the physical machine's system resources with anyone else and will be granted root-level access. You will exert complete authority over the server, which will enable you to make any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weakness of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a higher level of technical competence is needed - unless you employ an IT specialist, it will be your duty to administer and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated server hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the physical server isn't shared between any other clients.

A web hosting advice for beginner users

If you are just starting to build your website and are searching for a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the smartest option. If your web site outgrows your shared web hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your web site files, because only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any given time without worrying about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. Besides, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your website's popularity has grown!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS web hosting server or a dedicated web server hosting platform without having to swap hosting service providers.