What Actually is Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that web hosting providers provide so that you can upload your website to the Internet.

How can people reach your web site?

When you develop a website and you want other persons to visit it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make 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 constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting vendors provide you with disk drive storage space for your site on their high-end computers (servers) and guarantee constant Internet connectivity. When someone writes your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a peek at the content of your site.

Web hosting types

With the advance of Internet technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to answer the various needs of web site possessors, among them shared hosting services, private virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where a single hosting server is shared between multiple users who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and hosting server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't have to buy the whole hosting server in advance, since it is divided among numerous hosting customers, and the hosting supplier can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting distributor takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The setback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other hosting account holders and if a given website becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that server, but most hosting firms, including us at GoDaddy Chinese Support, have protection platforms at work that obstruct that from occurring.

A description of a web hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, most web hosting service providers and hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the web hosting marketplace, most web hosting firms strive to offer modest prices and gifts with their services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free-of-cost domain 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 web server hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a VPS server plan is an appropriate choice. virtual server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual web server hosting customers, but the hard drive space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private web server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization software gives you much more freedom to configure your virtual web hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical competence.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer gets an entire hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most powerful of all web hosting solutions and offers multiple configuration options - the dedicated server hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server is an excellent choice for a large-scale business web portal, for example - you will not share the physical server's system resources with anyone else and will be granted root privileges. You will have complete control over the physical server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical know-how is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology pro, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the physical server. The dedicated server hosting solution also costs much more, because the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other customers.

A hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just beginning to develop your site and are seeking a hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most intelligent choice. If your web site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your website files, since only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular moment without worrying about the time left before expiration. Additionally, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared hosting package and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it means that your web site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to switch to a VPS hosting server or a dedicated hosting platform without having to swap hosting providers.