What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is a service that hosting suppliers provide so that you can publish your site on the web.

How can people open your site?

When you make a web site and you wish other individuals to observe it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to render the web site available on the World Wide Web by shared 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 existence.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting vendors provide you with disk drive space for your web site on their powerful computers (web servers) and ensure uninterrupted network connectivity. When somebody types your web site address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a look at the content of your website.

Hosting varieties

With the progress of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into existence to fulfill the different demands of website proprietors, including shared website hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single web hosting server is shared between multiple hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and web hosting server disk space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is commonly less expensive - you don't have to buy the entire server in advance, since it is shared between numerous web hosting users, and the web hosting distributor can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting supplier handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The setback of the shared hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other shared hosting account owners and if a given website becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of hosting distributors, including us at gulfnetlink, have security platforms in place that prevent that from happening.

A description of a hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most web hosting companies and hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the web hosting market, most web hosting suppliers try to provide moderate prices and bonuses with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your finances. If you pick the annual billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one free-of-cost domain registration.

Virtual private servers

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared web hosting account, a virtual private web server hosting package is an appropriate option. VPS web server hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS hosting users, but the physical server is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed system resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual web hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your Virtual Private Server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets a whole dedicated hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most powerful of all website hosting solutions and offers lots of configuration possibilities - the dedicated web server hosting users can choose the hardware and software specs that will match their requirements. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting web server is a perfect option for a high resource-demanding business web site, for example - you will not share the hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be given full root-level access. You will exert full control over the web hosting server, which will allow you to make any configuration changes that you might require. The drawback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is needed - unless you hire an IT specialist, it will be your duty to administer and configure the physical server. The dedicated web server hosting solution also costs far more, since the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other clients.

A hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just starting to create your web site and are searching for a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most reasonable option. If your website outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your web site files, since only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular moment without worrying about the time left before the expiration date. Also, if you finally reach the most powerful shared web hosting plan and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to switch to a VPS hosting platform or a dedicated web server hosting platform without having to swap hosting providers.