Definition of Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that web hosting suppliers provide so that you can put your site online.

How can people see your website?

When you create a site and you want other people to view it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to make the website accessible online by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting firms offer you hard drive storage space for your web site on their high-powered computers (servers) and ensure constant Internet connection. When somebody types your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a glance at the content of your site.

Hosting types

With the progress of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into existence to meet the different demands of website proprietors, including shared hosting services, VPS web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single web server is divided among lots of shared hosting account holders who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and web hosting server storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of website hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't need to buy the entire hosting server in advance, since it is shared between a lot of customers, and the web hosting distributor can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the hosting distributor takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The weakness of the shared hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other customers and if one website becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that web server, but the majority of hosting firms, including us at Cleardigitalwave, have protection platforms at work that obstruct that from taking place.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, most web hosting suppliers and hosting users simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosting service providers try to offer reasonable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for example, offer different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your finances. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will get a bonus - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a VPS web hosting server package is a possible option. private virtual web server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual server web hosting account holders, but the disk drive is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private web hosting server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual web hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the user obtains an entire dedicated web hosting server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all web hosting solutions and offers numerous customization options - the dedicated server web hosting clients can choose the hardware and software specs that will answer their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting plan is a perfect choice for a heavy resource-demanding business portal, for instance - you will not share the dedicated hosting web server's system resources with anyone else and will have full server root access. You will exercise complete authority over the web hosting server, which will allow you to make any configuration modifications that you might require. The weakness of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical know-how is needed - unless you hire an Information Technology specialist, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also much more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared among any other customers.

A hosting tip for beginners

If you are just starting to set up your site and need a hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most sensible choice. If your web site grows beyond your hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and does not necessitate migration of your data, since only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the number of days remaining before expiration. Additionally, if you finally reach the most advanced shared hosting plan and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it signifies that your web site's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to move to a private virtual server or a dedicated web hosting platform without needing to change web hosting providers.