What is Shared Hosting?

The most principal and universally availed of form of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It's a way to host your web portal without having to understand much about programming and operating a web server. Additionally, it's also the cheapest form of website hosting and it's very affordable for anybody. Still, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name implies, the shared hosting solution is a form of service where multiple users share the system resources of one and the same web hosting server. This means that all server elements such as CPU, hard disk drives, RAM, network cards etc. are distributed among the clients whose accounts are on that very same hosting server. This is normally rendered attainable by setting up different accounts for the different users and assigning some limitations and quotas for each of them. Those limitations are applied in order to prevent the clients from interfering with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the web hosting server from overburdening. Usually, shared hosting customers do not have complete root-level access to the web hosting server's configuration files, which primarily indicates that they cannot access anything else on the web hosting server beside their own personal hosting account. The website hosting features that each account may resort to are determined by the hosting company that owns the web hosting server and by the particular web hosting package. That results in the second essential question:

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

Hosting corporations that furnish shared hosting services usually have diverse web hosting plans. Those packages offer different quotas of web hosting features and specifications, which in fact define the restrictions that a website hosting package will have. The client may select between the separate web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will suit him best. The web hosting plan will then determine what limits the client's account will involve, once set up. The costs and the specifications of the web hosting plans are fixed by the very hosting supplier. Based on the politics of the distributor, the shared hosting service falls into two categories - the free hosting solution and the common shared service, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" vendors as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to declare, which one is more preferable, since they are very different from each other and they really depend on the marketing policy of the given corporation and, of course, the demands of the specific customer.

What is the difference between the free of cost and the typical shared hosting solution?

Of course, the primary difference between the free and the paid service is in the amount of resources that they provide. Free web hosting companies are not capable of keeping a big amount of web hosting servers, hence, they simply host more customers on one single server by reducing the quantity of resources provided by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the web servers are monitored and dealt with properly, since the huge number of accounts may cause the hosting server to crash again and again. The majority of the free hosting providers, though, ignore the quality of the service and therefore, it's quite difficult to discover a free website hosting solution that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting corporations normally provide free technical support even to the free hosting clients, because they want their websites to grow bigger so that they eventually move to a paid web hosting account, which offers more web hosting features. One such firm, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the biggest and oldest free web hosting companies worldwide.

On the other hand, established shared hosting providers like us, are able to maintain lots of web hosting servers and so, we are able to offer much more feature-rich web hosting plans. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web hosting plan, though, does not automatically denote that this solution has a better quality. The most advantageous services are the balanced ones, which offer a price that corresponds to the concrete service which you're getting. What's more, we also offer a free extra with the website hosting package, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of free-of-charge site layouts. As a web hosting firm, we do care about our good name and this is the reason why if you go with us, you can be certain that you won't get fooled into paying for an account that you cannot in fact make use of.

What should I anticipate from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for people who desire to host an average site, which is going to utilize a small or medium amount of traffic every month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business gets bigger, your web portal will become more and more demanding. Therefore, you will have to eventually migrate to a more powerful website hosting service like a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (aka a virtual private hosting server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when selecting a hosting vendor, you should also ponder about scalability, otherwise you might end up relocating your domain manually to a different company, which can cause site complications and even extended downtime for your site. If you choose Hosting South Africa as your hosting vendor, you can rest safe that we can present you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow, is crucial and will spare you a lot of difficulties in the long run.