What Does Website Hosting Stand for?

Website hosting is a service that companies offer so that you can put your web site on the Internet.

How can people view your web site?

When you develop a web site and you want other people to access it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to make the web site visible online by website hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why web hosting services came into being.

How does website hosting work?

Web hosting vendors offer you disk drive storage space for your website on their high-power computers (web hosting servers) and ensure uninterrupted Internet connectivity. When someone types your web site address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your site.

Hosting varieties

With the advance of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to satisfy the various expectations of web site owners, including shared website hosting services, virtual server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most commonly used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where a single server is shared among numerous web hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and data storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of website hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't need to purchase the entire server in advance, as it is divided among numerous web hosting account owners, and the web hosting company can afford to provide much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other clients and if a given site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that server, but most hosting companies, including us at Zazti, have protection systems at work that hinder that from occurring.

A description of a web hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, most web hosting companies and web hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosting vendors strive to offer modest prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you pick the yearly invoicing cycle, you will obtain a present - one free-of-cost domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual web server hosting package is an appropriate option. virtual private web server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server hosting users, but the physical machine is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual server, but it also calls for a more advanced level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the customer gets an entire web server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers many configuration options - the dedicated web hosting clients can pick the hardware and software specifications that will meet their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server is an excellent solution for a large-scale corporate web site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated server's system resources with anyone else and will obtain complete root access. You will exercise complete control over the server, which will enable you to make any server configuration changes that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is required - unless you engage an IT professional, it will be your duty to administer and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also much more costly, since the cost of the server isn't shared among any other users.

A hosting tip for beginners

If you are just starting to set up your web site and are looking for a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most reasonable choice. If your web site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the parameters of your website 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 time left until the expiration date. Also, if you finally reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to migrate to a virtual private web server or a dedicated web server hosting platform without needing to switch hosting service providers.