Web Hosting Description

Web hosting is a service that hosting companies provide so that you can publish your site on the Internet.

How can people reach your web site?

When you make a web site and you would like other people to access it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to render the website reachable on the web by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why hosting services exist.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting distributors provide you with disk storage space for your site on their high-end computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee constant network connectivity. When somebody types your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a gaze at the content of your website.

Web hosting types

With the advancement of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have emerged to satisfy the various expectations of website possessors, among them shared web hosting services, VPS server web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single hosting server is shared between multiple hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, traffic and data space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is generally less expensive - you don't have to pay for the entire server in advance, since it is divided between a lot of web hosting account holders, and the web hosting provider can afford to offer much more moderate prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting vendor takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The negative side of the shared hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's system resources with other hosting account holders and if a given web site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of web hosting companies, including us at Intraden, have security platforms at work that hinder that from happening.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting firms and hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of hosting providers try to offer moderate prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, provide different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your budget. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free-of-cost domain registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a VPS is an appropriate choice. VPS server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual server web hosting account owners, but the hard disk is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual private web server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual web server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user obtains an entire dedicated web hosting server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most robust of all hosting solutions and offers numerous customization options - the dedicated web server hosting customers 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 hosting web server is a perfect solution for a intense-traffic corporate site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full root privileges. You will exert full control over the server, which will enable you to implement any configuration changes that you might require. The weak side of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a higher level of technical competence is required - unless you hire an IT specialist, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the dedicated web server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more expensive, because the cost of the physical machine isn't shared among any other customers.

A web hosting advice for novices

If you are just beginning to build your web site and are searching for a web hosting solution to start out with, the shared web hosting solution persists to be the best choice. If your website grows beyond your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your data, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the number of days left until expiration. Also, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared web hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it indicates that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to migrate to a VPS hosting platform or a dedicated server without the need to swap hosting service providers.