What Exactly is Shared Website Hosting?

The most primary and popularly used sort of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It constitutes a way to host your site without having to be much informed about programming and handling a web hosting server. What's more, it's also the most inexpensive type of web hosting and it's quite affordable for everyone. Nevertheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name hints, the shared hosting service is a type of service where plenty of users share the reserves of the same web server. This goes to say that all web server components like CPU, hard disks, RAM, network interface cards etc. are distributed among the clients whose accounts are on that very same web server. This is normally made attainable by setting up different accounts for the different users and applying specific restrictions and usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are assigned so as to hinder the customers from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the server from overburdening. Usually, shared hosting customers do not have root-level access to the server's configuration files, which primarily implies that they do not have access to anything else on the web hosting server aside from their own personal hosting account. The website hosting resources that each account may use are fixed by the web hosting firm that possesses the server and by the respective web hosting package. That necessitates the second important question:

How are the shared hosting servers shared among the users?

Hosting firms that provide shared hosting packages typically have various website hosting plans. Those packages contain different quotas of website hosting resources and specifications, which actually fix the limits that a website hosting plan will have. The user may pick between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he deems will suit him best. The web hosting package will then determine what limitations the client's account will involve, once set up. The prices and the features of the hosting plans are determined by the very hosting corporation. Based on the policy of the company, the shared hosting service can be divided into two categories - the free hosting solution and the common shared solution, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" retailers as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to allege, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they really are determined by the marketing policy of the specific provider and, of course, the requirements of the particular client.

What is the distinction between the free and the typical shared hosting service?

Of course, the main difference between the free of cost and the paid service is in the amount of features that they include. Free website hosting companies are not capable of maintaining a large amount of hosting servers, hence, they simply accommodate more customers on one web server by reducing the amount of resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only in case the servers are monitored and tackled properly, because the immense number of accounts may cause the web hosting server to crash frequently. Most of the free web hosting suppliers, though, ignore the quality of the service and hence, it's quite hard to discover a free website hosting service that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting distributors commonly provide free client support even to the free web hosting users, because they want their websites to grow so that they eventually move to a paid website hosting account, which offers more hosting resources. One such distributor, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and oldest free web hosting vendors in the world.

On the other hand, established shared hosting distributors like us, are able to keep plenty of web servers and therefore, we may afford to offer much more feature-rich web hosting plans. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the website hosting plans. Paying a higher price for a web hosting plan, though, does not automatically imply that this plan has a better quality. The most optimal services are the balanced ones, which offer a price that matches the real service which you're receiving. Moreover, we also offer a free bonus with the website hosting package, like the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by 100's of gratis skins. As a website hosting distributor, we do look after our reputation and that's why if you pick us, you can be assured that you won't get swindled into purchasing a solution that you cannot in fact make use of.

What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for individuals who want to host a standard web portal, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business grows, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. So, you will have to ultimately upgrade to a more feature-rich web hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (also known as a private virtual web hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when choosing a web hosting vendor, you should also reflect about scalability, otherwise you might end up transferring your domain manually to a different supplier, which can bring about site predicaments and even prolonged downtime for your website. If you pick SCI-SERVERS as your web hosting distributor, you can rest safe that we can present you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is essential and will spare you a lot of problems in the future.