Definition of Website Hosting

Website hosting is a service that web hosting providers offer so that you can upload your website online.

How can people spot your site?

When you make a web site and you would like other people to spot it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you attempt to render the web site available on the World Wide Web by website hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services exist.

How does website hosting work?

Web hosting suppliers offer you content storage space for your site on their high-powered computers (web servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet access. When somebody types your URL (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a peek at the content of your web site.

Types of hosting

With the advance of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to satisfy the different demands of web site proprietors, among them shared website hosting services, VPS web server hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single web server is divided between plenty of users who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and hosting server disk drive storage space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of web hosting is typically cheaper - you don't have to buy the entire hosting server upfront, as it is shared among plenty of web hosting account owners, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The weak side of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if one website becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other websites on that server, but most web hosts, including us at Lair Secure Net, have protection platforms at work that impede that from happening.

A definition of a website hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of hosting suppliers and hosting clients simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of hosting suppliers strive to offer reasonable prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different web hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your resources. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a virtual hosting server plan is a suitable solution. virtual private web server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS hosting clients, but the hard drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS web hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your virtual server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the customer obtains an entire hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most flexible of all web hosting solutions and offers tons of configuration options - the dedicated server hosting clients can pick the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server web hosting plan is a perfect choice for a high resource-devouring corporate portal, for example - you will not share the physical machine's resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with complete server root access. You will exert complete control over the physical server, which will enable you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weak side of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical know-how is required - unless you employ an IT expert, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the physical machine. The dedicated server hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared among any other customers.

A hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to build your web site and need a web hosting solution to start out with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most reasonable choice. If your web site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given time without having to worry about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. In addition, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it indicates that your web site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to switch to a private virtual web server hosting solution or a dedicated web server without having to change web hosting providers.