What Precisely is Shared Web Hosting?

The most basic and commonly availed of form of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It represents a means to host your site without having to know much about programming and administrating a hosting server. Moreover, it's also the most economical type of website hosting and it's in fact affordable for everyone. However, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name denotes, the shared hosting service is a type of service where a lot of customers share the resources of the same web hosting server. This suggests that all web server components such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, NICs and so on, are shared among the customers whose accounts are on that very same web server. This is mostly made possible by creating different accounts for the different customers and setting some restrictions and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are imposed in order to prevent the customers from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the web hosting server from overloading. Normally, shared hosting customers do not have complete root-level access to the web server's configuration files, which essentially means that they do not have access to anything else on the server apart from their own hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may use are set by the hosting corporation that possesses the web server and by the given web hosting package. That results in the second important question:

How are the shared hosting web servers split among the clients?

Web hosting distributors that offer shared hosting accounts typically have diverse website hosting plans. Those plans offer diverse amounts of website hosting resources and specs, which in fact fix the limitations that a website hosting account will have. The user may select between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he deems will suit him best. The website hosting plan will then define what restrictions the user's account will have, once opened. The prices and the specs of the website hosting packages are fixed by the actual hosting supplier. Depending on the policy of the company, the shared hosting service falls into two types - the free hosting service and the classic shared solution, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" suppliers as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to state, which one is better, since they are very different from one another and they indeed are determined by the business tactics of the specific firm and, of course, the demands of the particular customer.

What is the difference between the free and the typical shared hosting service?

Of course, the major difference between the free of cost and the paid service is in the quantity of features that they provide. Free website hosting vendors are not capable of keeping an immense amount of hosting servers, therefore, they just host more users on one single server by lowering the quantity of resources offered by the accounts. This will be efficient only in case the web servers are monitored and handled properly, because the immense number of accounts may causer the web server to crash over and over again. The majority of the free web hosting companies, however, overlook the quality of the service and as a result, it's very tough to come across a free of charge hosting service that's actually worth the time. The top free hosting distributors typically offer free technical support even to the free web hosting customers, since they want their web portals to grow so that they subsequently migrate to a paid website hosting plan, which offers more website hosting features. Such provider, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the biggest and oldest free website hosting providers worldwide.

At the same time, traditional shared hosting distributors like us, are able to maintain a lot of hosting servers and therefore, we are able to offer much more feature-rich web hosting packages. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web hosting plan, however, does not necessarily signify that this plan has a better quality. The most advantageous services are the balanced ones, which involve a price that matches the actual service which you're obtaining. Also, we also offer a free extra with the web hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of gratis design templates. As a hosting corporation, we do care about our good name and that is the reason why if you pick us, you can be confident that you won't get swindled into buying a service that you cannot in fact avail of.

What should I anticipate from a shared hosting service?

The shared hosting solution is best for people who want to host a normal web site, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of web traffic every month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business develops, your web site will become more and more resource consuming. So, you will have to eventually move to a more feature-rich website hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated servers, a VPS hosting (aka a virtual private hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when picking a website hosting vendor, you should also ponder about scalability, or else you might end up transferring your domain manually to a separate supplier, which can create website troubles and even extended downtime for your web portal. If you pick MTWS as your web hosting distributor, you can rest safe that we can provide you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is essential and will spare you a lot of inconveniences in the future.