Explanation of Shared Hosting

The most elemental and regularly used type of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It constitutes a means to host your web site without having to understand much about programming and administrating a server. Furthermore, it's also the most inexpensive form of web hosting and it's indeed affordable for everybody. Nevertheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name implies, the shared hosting service is a type of service where multiple users share the reserves of one and the same web server. This goes to say that all web server ingredients such as CPU, hard disks, RAM, NICs and so on, are divided among the users whose accounts are on that same hosting server. This is mostly made viable by setting up different accounts for the separate users and applying some restrictions and usage quotas for each of them. Those limitations are appointed so as to restrain the customers from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to hinder the hosting server from overloading. Typically, shared hosting users do not have root-level access to the server's configuration files, which principally implies that they cannot access anything else on the server but their very own hosting account. The website hosting features that each account may avail of are fixed by the hosting firm that owns the web server and by the particular website hosting plan. That causes the second vital question:

How are the shared hosting web servers shared among the customers?

Hosting distributors that distribute shared hosting accounts typically have different web hosting packages. Those plans offer diverse amounts of web hosting features and specifications, which in fact fix the limits that a hosting account will have. The client may choose between the different web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will suit him best. The website hosting package will then determine what limits the client's account will have, once created. The costs and the specs of the website hosting plans are defined by the particular web hosting firm. Depending on the politics of the firm, the shared hosting service can be divided into two categories - the free hosting service and the classic shared solution, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" suppliers as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to claim, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from one another and they actually depend on the marketing strategy of the given vendor and, of course, the demands of the given user.

What is the difference between the free of charge and the classic shared hosting solution?

Of course, the chief difference between the free of cost and the paid service is in the amount of resources that they involve. Free website hosting vendors are not capable of maintaining an immense amount of servers, therefore, they merely accommodate more clients on a single web hosting server by reducing the amount of resources provided by the accounts. This will be effective only on condition that the web hosting servers are supervised and handled appropriately, because the great amount of accounts may cause the hosting server to crash repeatedly. The majority of the free website hosting suppliers, however, neglect the quality of the service and therefore, it's very difficult to find a free of cost web hosting solution that's in fact worth the effort. The top free hosting vendors usually provide free customer support even to the free website hosting clients, because they want their web pages to expand so that they eventually upgrade to a paid website hosting package, which includes more web hosting resources. One such supplier, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and oldest free web hosting corporations worldwide.

At the same time, established shared hosting corporations such as us, are able to maintain numerous web servers and hence, we are able to provide much more powerful web hosting plans. Of course, that affects the pricing of the website hosting plans. Paying a higher fee for a hosting service, however, does not necessarily mean that this service has a better quality. The best solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a price that corresponds to the actual service which you're obtaining. What's more, we also give a free extra with the hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with 100's of charge-free website layouts. As a web hosting firm, we do look after our reputation and that is the reason why if you go with us, you can be certain that you won't get swindled into buying an account that you cannot actually avail of.

What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for persons who desire to host a basic web page, which is going to swallow a small or medium amount of traffic every month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business expands, your website will become more and more demanding. Therefore, you will have to ultimately migrate to a more feature-rich website hosting service like a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (also known as a private virtual web server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when choosing a web hosting distributor, you should also reflect about scalability, otherwise you might end up transferring your domain manually to a different vendor, which can create web site complications and even continued downtime for your site. If you choose Layer3.host as your hosting provider, you can rest safe that we can present you with the required domain name and hosting services as you grow, is essential and will save you lots of frustrations in the future.