What is Shared Website Hosting?

The most elemental and popularly availed of kind of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It's a way to host your website without having to be much informed about programming and administrating a web hosting server. Moreover, it's also the cheapest form of web hosting and it's very affordable for everyone. Nonetheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name hints, the shared hosting solution is a type of service where multiple clients share the reserves of one and the same server. This implies that all hosting server ingredients such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, network cards etc. are divided among the customers whose accounts are on that very same hosting server. This is normally made attainable by setting up different accounts for the different customers and assigning specific limits and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are imposed in order to restrain the users from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the web hosting server from overloading. Usually, shared hosting clients do not have complete root access to the web server's configuration files, which principally denotes that they cannot access anything else on the web hosting server aside from their own personal web hosting account. The web hosting resources that each account may utilize are determined by the hosting distributor that owns the web hosting server and by the particular website hosting package. That brings about the second vital question:

How are the shared hosting web servers split among the customers?

Hosting providers that deliver shared hosting packages usually have various hosting packages. Those packages involve different amounts of website hosting features and specs, which in fact define the limits that a web hosting account will have. The client may select between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will fit him best. The hosting package will then define what restrictions the user's account will have, once opened. The prices and the specifications of the website hosting plans are defined by the specific web hosting firm. Depending on the policy of the vendor, the shared hosting service can be divided into 2 groups - the free hosting solution and the typical shared solution, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" traders as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to assert, which one is better, since they are very different from each other and they indeed are determined by the marketing policy of the particular company and, of course, the requirements of the specific client.

What is the distinction between the free and the popular shared hosting solution?

Of course, the major difference between the free and the paid service is in the amount of resources that they contain. Free web hosting firms are not capable of keeping a huge number of servers, therefore, they plainly accommodate more clients on one server by decreasing the quantity of resources provided by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the servers are kept under surveillance and administered appropriately, since the great amount of accounts may make the web server crash time and time again. Most of the free website hosting providers, however, ignore the quality of the service and therefore, it's very hard to find a free of charge hosting service that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting companies usually provide free customer support even to the free web hosting users, since they want their websites to expand so that they subsequently migrate to a paid website hosting account, which includes more web hosting resources. One such supplier, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and eldest free website hosting firms in the world.

At the same time, established shared hosting vendors like us, may afford to keep many hosting servers and so, we may afford to offer much more feature-rich web hosting plans. Of course, that influences the cost of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher fee for a web hosting package, however, does not necessarily signify that this package has a better quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which offer a price that matches the real service which you're obtaining. Furthermore, we also provide a free bonus with the hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by hundreds of cost-free skins. As a hosting provider, we do look after our reputation and this is the reason why if you choose us, you can be calm that you won't get deluded into paying for an account that you cannot in fact utilize.

What should I anticipate from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for individuals who wish to host a normal web portal, which is going to generate a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot expect, though, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business develops, your site will become more and more demanding. So, you will have to eventually migrate to a more powerful website hosting service such as a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (aka a virtual private hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when choosing a website hosting distributor, you should also think about scalability, or else you might end up transferring your domain manually to a different supplier, which can bring about website complications and even continuous downtime for your web site. If you choose WebInAfrica as your web hosting distributor, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the required domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is crucial and will spare you lots of inconveniences in the long run.