Web Hosting Definition

Web hosting is a service that web hosting corporations offer so that you can upload your website to the Internet.

How can people spot your web site?

When you make a site and you want other persons to access it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you try to make the website accessible on the World Wide Web by web hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services exist.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting corporations provide you with storage space for your website on their high-powered computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee continuous network uptime. When somebody writes your domain name (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a glance at the content of your site.

Web hosting varieties

With the advancement of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to fulfill the various expectations of web site possessors, including shared hosting services, VPS server hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single server is shared among plenty of web hosting customers who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and server space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of hosting is normally cheaper - you don't have to purchase the whole hosting server in advance, as it is divided among multiple hosting users, and the hosting services provider can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting company takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates for you.

The disadvantage of the shared hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if a given site becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that hosting server, but most web hosts, including us at BETAx Hosting, have security platforms at work that impede that from happening.

A definition of a web hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most widely used form of web hosting, most web hosting distributors and hosting clients simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge competition on the hosting market, most hosting distributors strive to provide affordable prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your funds. If you choose the yearly billing cycle, you will get a bonus - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual private web server hosting package is a possible solution. Virtual Private Server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS server web hosting clients, 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 web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web server are not shared. Also, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the user gets a whole physical server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated web server hosting solution is the most reliable of all hosting solutions and offers numerous customization possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting customers can select the hardware and software specifications that will answer their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web hosting package is an excellent option for a high resource-requiring corporate web site, for example - you will not share the physical machine's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full root privileges. You will exercise full authority over the server, which will permit you to implement any configuration changes that you might need. The weak side of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical knowledge is needed - unless you hire an IT expert, it will be your duty to manage and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more expensive, because the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared among any other customers.

A website hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your site and need a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most relevant option. If your site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and requires no migration of your data, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without worrying about the time left before the expiration date. What is more, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has grown!), there always is the option to move to a VPS hosting server or a dedicated web hosting solution without the need to change web hosting service providers.