What Actually is Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that web hosting providers offer so that you can get your website online.

How can people spot your web site?

When you build a web site and you would like other people to check it out, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to render the website visible on the web by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting firms provide you with disk drive storage space for your site on their high-power computers (servers) and ensure continuous 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 have a gaze at the content of your web site.

Hosting varieties

With the growth of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to answer the different needs of website owners, among them shared hosting services, private virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one server is divided between numerous hosting customers who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web content space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of website hosting is generally less expensive - you don't need to buy the entire hosting server in advance, as it is shared among numerous web hosting account owners, and the web hosting vendor can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the hosting distributor takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates for you.

The weak side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other individuals and if a given site becomes really busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that web server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at TM Web Hosting, have protection platforms in place that impede that from taking place.

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 refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the hosting market, the majority of hosting suppliers try to offer reasonable prices and gifts with their services. We, for example, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your finances. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one free-of-cost domain name registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a VPS web hosting plan is an appropriate option. virtual web server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other Virtual Private Server web 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 an actual dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your VPS web server, but it also presupposes a higher degree of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user gets a whole physical machine and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers plenty of configuration options - the dedicated server hosting customers can choose the hardware and software specifications that will meet their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated hosting web server is a perfect solution for a resource-swallowing business web portal, for instance - you will not share the physical server's system resources with anyone else and will be given full root privileges. You will exercise complete control over the server, which will enable you to implement any server 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 specialist, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the server. The dedicated hosting solution also costs much more, because the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared among any other clients.

A website hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just starting to build your web site and are looking for a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared web hosting solution remains the most logical option. If your web site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your web site files, since only the parameters of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular moment without worrying about the number of days left until expiration. In addition, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to move to a private virtual web hosting server or a dedicated web hosting platform without the need to swap hosting service providers.