What Precisely is Shared Hosting?

The most standard and popularly used form of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It's a way to host your web site without having to know much about programming and handling a web hosting server. Moreover, it's also the most economical type of website hosting and it's quite affordable for everyone. Still, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name implies, the shared hosting service is a type of service where a lot of users share the system resources of the same web hosting server. This suggests that all web hosting server components like CPU, hard drives, RAM, network cards and so on, are allocated among the clients whose accounts are on that very same server. This is typically made attainable by setting up different accounts for the separate users and setting given limits and quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are assigned so as to hinder the clients from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the web hosting server from overburdening. Normally, shared hosting clients do not have complete root-level access to the web server's config files, which essentially suggests that they cannot access anything else on the server apart from their own personal website hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may utilize are fixed by the web hosting corporation that possesses the server and by the particular website hosting plan. That causes the second important question:

How are the shared hosting servers divided among the customers?

Web hosting firms that deliver shared hosting packages normally have different web hosting plans. Those plans offer diverse amounts of website hosting features and specifications, which actually fix the limitations that a website hosting package will include. The customer may choose between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will befit him best. The web hosting plan will then determine what limitations the client's account will involve, once opened. The prices and the specs of the web hosting plans are determined by the given web hosting distributor. Based on the policy of the vendor, the shared hosting service falls into two categories - the free hosting service and the regular shared solution, most recently very famous among "cPanel hosting" distributors as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to affirm, which one is better, since they are quite different from each other and they indeed are dependent on the business tactics of the specific vendor and, of course, the requirements of the particular user.

What is the contrast between the free of charge and the regular shared hosting service?

Of course, the principal difference between the free and the paid solution is in the amount of resources that they include. Free website hosting distributors are not capable of keeping a great amount of web hosting servers, hence, they simply accommodate more clients on a single hosting server by reducing the quantity of resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only on condition that the servers are supervised and maintained properly, since the huge amount of accounts may make the web server crash frequently. The majority of the free website hosting vendors, however, neglect the quality of the service and hence, it's very difficult to find a free of cost website hosting solution that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting companies typically offer free client support even to the free web hosting users, since they want their sites to get bigger so that they subsequently move to a paid web hosting account, which includes more web hosting resources. Such provider, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and oldest free web hosting suppliers in the world.

At the same time, traditional shared hosting distributors such as us, are able to maintain multiple web hosting servers and so, we may afford to offer much more feature-rich web hosting plans. Of course, that affects the pricing of the web hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a hosting package, though, does not automatically mean that this solution has a better quality. The most optimal solutions are the balanced ones, which offer a fee that matches the actual service which you're getting. What's more, we also give a free extra with the website hosting plan, such as the 1-click applications installer, complemented with 100's of gratis web page skins. As a web hosting supplier, we do care about our good name and this is the reason why if you select us, you can be assured that you won't get duped into paying for a package that you cannot actually avail of.

What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for individuals who desire to host a normal web page, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot expect, though, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business gets bigger, your web page will become more and more resource consuming. Hence, you will have to eventually upgrade to a more feature-rich web hosting solution like a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (also known as a virtual private web server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when picking a web hosting vendor, you should also think about scalability, or else you might end up migrating your domain manually to a separate vendor, which can create web site problems and even extended downtime for your web page. If you select iNet Finland as your website hosting distributor, you can rest safe that we can provide you with the required domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is crucial and will spare you a lot of problems in the future.