As the name hints, the shared site hosting service is a kind of service where many users share the system resources of one and the same web server. This suggests that all web hosting server elements such as CPU, hard disk drives, RAM, NICs etc. are distributed among the customers whose accounts are on that same web server.
This is normally made achievable by opening different accounts for the different users and assigning specific limits and quotas for each of them. Those limitations are fixed in order to restrain the clients from meddling with each other’s accounts and, of course, to hinder the server from overburdening.
Normally, shared web page hosting users do not have full root-level access to the server’s config files, which primarily means that they cannot access anything else on the server but their very own shared web site hosting account. The web site hosting resources that each account may resort to are fixed by the web hosting vendor that owns the web server and by the respective hosting plan. That leads to the second essential question:
How are the shared hosting servers shared among the clients?
Hosting corporations that offer shared web page hosting solutions commonly have various webspace hosting packages. Those plans provide diverse amounts of webspace hosting features and specs, which actually fix the limitations that a hosting account will include. The customer may pick between the individual website hosting accounts and sign up for the one that he thinks will suit him best.
The webspace hosting plan will then determine what limitations the user’s account will have, once created. The costs and the specifications of the web space hosting plans are defined by the very hosting vendor. Depending on the politics of the supplier, the shared web hosting service falls into two categories – the free website hosting service and the popular shared service, currently very famous among «cPanel cloud web hosting» merchants as a cloud web hosting one.
It’s not possible to allege, which one is more preferable, since they are quite different from each other and they really are dependent on the marketing strategy of the given vendor and, of course, the demands of the particular user.
What is the distinction between the free and the standard shared hosting solution?
Of course, the principal difference between the free and the paid solution is in the amount of resources that they contain. Free site hosting suppliers are not able to keep an immense amount of web servers, therefore, they just accommodate more clients on one single hosting server by decreasing the quantity of resources offered by the accounts. This will be effective only if the servers are kept under surveillance and tackled appropriately, since the great amount of accounts may cause the web hosting server to crash regularly.
The majority of the free web site hosting firms, though, neglect the quality of the service and therefore, it’s quite hard to find a free of charge website hosting solution that’s actually worth the time. The top free web hosting firms typically offer free client support even to the free web hosting users, because they want their sites to grow bigger so that they eventually move to a paid web site hosting package, which includes more website hosting features. One such supplier, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the biggest and eldest free website hosting companies worldwide.
On the other hand, established shared website hosting firms such as Lonex.com, for instance, are able to keep plenty of servers and hence, they are able to provide much more feature-rich web space hosting packages. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the site hosting plans.
Paying a higher price for a website hosting plan, however, does not necessarily mean that this solution has a better quality. The most optimal solutions are the balanced ones, which offer a price that corresponds to the actual service which you’re obtaining. The top hosting providers that have been around for a long time are displaying their prices and plan specs in an objective manner, so that the customer may familiar with what in fact he is obtaining.
In addition, some of them provide a free bonus with the web hosting package, such as the 1-click Web Applications Installer, complemented with hundreds of charge-free website templates that are offered by Lonex.com. Such site hosting vendors do worry about their reputation and that’s why if you select them, you can rest confident that you won’t get duped into paying for a package that you cannot in fact make use of.
What should I expect from a shared website hosting service?
The shared web hosting solution is best for people who are looking to host a standard website, which is going to swallow a small or medium amount of bandwidth each month.
You cannot expect, however, that a shared website hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business grows bigger, your web portal will become more and more resource consuming. Therefore, you will have to eventually migrate to a more powerful web space hosting solution like a Semi-dedicated hosting server, a Virtual Private Server (also known as a virtual private web server, or VPS), or why not a Dedicated Server.
So, when picking a web hosting provider, you should also think about how they can be of service to you, or else you might end up moving your domains manually to a different company, which can cause website problems and even prolonged downtime for your web portal.