Description of Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that hosting service providers provide so that you can put your website on the web.

How can people check out your site?

When you set up a web site and you wish other persons to visit it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to make the web site reachable on the web by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why web hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting corporations offer you hard drive storage space for your site on their high-end computers (web servers) and guarantee uninterrupted Internet connection. When somebody types your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can see the content of your website.

Web hosting varieties

With the development of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to answer the various demands of website possessors, among them shared hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where a single hosting server is shared among plenty of hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and data storage space quotas that they have been allotted. This form of web hosting is usually less expensive - you don't have to purchase the whole hosting server in advance, since it is divided among numerous web hosting account owners, and the web hosting company can afford to offer much lower prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates for you.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other web hosting customers and if a given site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other websites on that web server, but the majority of hosting distributors, including us at ACHEMA HOST, have protection platforms in place that impede that from occurring.

A description of a hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most hosting providers and hosting clients simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the web hosting market, most web hosting distributors strive to offer low prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you select the yearly billing cycle, you will get a bonus - one charge-free domain name registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a VPS web hosting plan is a suitable solution. Virtual Private Server web hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other Virtual Private Server web hosting account holders, but the physical server is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual private web hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your Virtual Private Server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the client gets an entire physical server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers a lot of configuration possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting users can select the hardware and software specs that will meet their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting plan is a perfect solution for a high resource-demanding business portal, for example - you will not share the hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will be given full server root privileges. You will exercise full control over the server, which will permit you to make any server configuration modifications that you might need. The weak side of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical expertise is required - unless you hire an Information Technology pro, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the physical machine. The dedicated hosting solution also costs far more, since the cost of the physical machine isn't shared among any other users.

A web hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to develop your site and are searching for a hosting solution to start with, the shared hosting solution remains the best choice. If your web site outgrows your shared web hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your website files, because only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular moment without having to worry about the number of days left before expiration. In addition, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to move to a virtual web hosting server or a dedicated web hosting server without needing to change web hosting providers.