An explanation of web hosting
The most standard and frequently availed of type of web hosting is the shared web hosting service. It represents a means to host your website without having to know much about programming and running a web hosting server. Moreover, it's also the cheapest form of web space hosting and it's indeed affordable for everybody. Still, what is shared hosting?
What is shared website hosting?
As the name designates, the shared webspace hosting service is a kind of service where multiple clients share the system reserves of one and the same web server. This goes to say that all web server constituents such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, network cards and so on, are split among the users whose accounts are on that very same web server. This is mostly made accomplishable by setting up separate accounts for the different customers and imposing some limits and quotas for each of them. Those limitations are set so as to hinder the users from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the hosting server from overloading. Normally, shared site hosting clients do not have full root-level access to the hosting server's config files, which primarily signifies that they cannot access anything else on the web server aside from their own shared hosting account. The web site hosting features that each account may avail of are determined by the hosting distributor that owns the web server and by the respective website hosting package. That paves the way for the second important question:
How are the shared web hosting servers split among the users?
Hosting corporations that supply shared website hosting solutions commonly have diverse web site hosting packages. Those plans provide diverse quotas of website hosting resources and specs, which actually set the limits that a site hosting package will have. The client may select between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he deems will suit him best. The web space hosting package will then define what limits the client's account will involve, once created. The costs and the specs of the web site hosting plans are set by the specific web hosting vendor. Depending on the politics of the firm, the shared site hosting service falls into 2 types - the free hosting service and the regular shared solution, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" companies as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to affirm, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from one another and they indeed are dependent on the marketing policy of the given vendor and, of course, the demands of the specific customer.
What is the contrast between the free of charge and the regular shared web space hosting solution?
Of course, the principal difference between the free of cost and the paid solution is in the amount of resources that they contain. Free web site hosting suppliers are not capable of keeping a great amount of web servers, therefore, they just accommodate more customers on one single web server by decreasing the quantity of resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only if the web hosting servers are kept under surveillance and dealt with properly, because the large amount of accounts may make the hosting server crash again and again. Most of the free web space hosting firms, though, ignore the quality of the service and hence, it's quite hard to come across a free web hosting solution that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting firms normally provide free technical support even to the free website hosting customers, because they want their web sites to grow bigger so that they eventually migrate to a paid webspace hosting plan, which offers more webspace hosting resources. Such distributor, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the biggest and eldest free website hosting companies worldwide.
On the other hand, traditional shared web hosting firms like Spinal Cord, for example, may afford to keep many web hosting servers and therefore, they may afford to offer much more feature-rich web space hosting packages. Of course, that affects the cost of the web space hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a web site hosting package, though, does not automatically signify that this account has a better quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which involve a price that matches the real service which you're receiving. The best web space hosting firms that have been around for quite a while are displaying their prices and plan configurations in a realistic way, so that the client may acquainted with what exactly he is receiving. Besides, some of them provide a free extra with the web space hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of fee-free site templates that are provided by 'Spinal Cord'. Such web hosting distributors do care about their good name and that is the reason why if you choose them, you can rest confident that you won't get deceived into buying a plan that you cannot in fact utilize.
What should I anticipate from a shared hosting solution?
The shared web space hosting service is best for people who want to host an average web site, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of traffic every month. You cannot anticipate, though, that a shared web page hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business expands, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. Therefore, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich web hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated server, a VPS (aka a virtual web server, or VPS), or why not a dedicated server. So, when choosing a hosting distributor, you should also ponder about how they can be of service to you, or else you might end up migrating your domain name manually to a different distributor, which can create site predicaments and even prolonged downtime for your site. Hence, going with a hosting company such as 'Spinal Cord', which can supply you with the required domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is vital and will spare you a lot of nuisances in the future.