How Does Shared Hosting Operate?

The most elemental and popularly availed of sort of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It constitutes a means to host your site without having to know much about programming and running a web server. Furthermore, it's also the cheapest form of web hosting and it's indeed affordable for anybody. However, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name signifies, the shared hosting solution is a form of service where a lot of clients share the resources of one and the same server. This implies that all web hosting server ingredients like CPU, hard drives, RAM, network interface cards and so on, are allotted among the clients whose accounts are on that very same hosting server. This is usually rendered achievable by opening different accounts for the different clients and applying certain limitations and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are set so as to hinder the users from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the hosting server from overburdening. Usually, shared hosting customers do not have complete root access to the web server's configuration files, which principally implies that they cannot access anything else on the server but their very own web hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may use are set by the hosting corporation that owns the hosting server and by the respective website hosting package. That gives rise to the second important question:

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

Hosting companies that provide shared hosting packages normally have diverse website hosting packages. Those plans contain diverse quotas of web hosting features and specifications, which actually define the restrictions that a web hosting package will include. The customer may choose between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will suit him best. The website hosting plan will then define what restrictions the customer's account will include, once set up. The prices and the features of the web hosting packages are chosen by the given hosting corporation. Based on the policy of the vendor, the shared hosting solution can be divided into two types - the free hosting solution and the standard shared service, most recently very famous among "cPanel hosting" companies as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to say, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they indeed are dependent on the business policy of the particular vendor and, of course, the requirements of the given client.

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

Of course, the principal difference between the free and the paid service is in the quantity of resources that they contain. Free web hosting suppliers are not capable of keeping a large amount of servers, hence, they merely accommodate more users on one single server by decreasing the quantity of system resources offered by the accounts. This will be efficient only if the web servers are supervised and tackled properly, since the enormous number of accounts may cause the server to crash time and time again. Most of the free website hosting providers, however, overlook the quality of the service and as a result, it's very hard to come across a free of charge website hosting service that's in fact worth the effort. The top free hosting firms usually provide free technical support even to the free web hosting clients, since they want their web sites to get bigger so that they subsequently migrate to a paid web hosting package, which includes more web hosting features. Such firm, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and eldest free website hosting companies worldwide.

At the same time, established shared hosting providers like us, may afford to keep plenty of web hosting servers and so, we are able to offer much more powerful web hosting plans. Of course, that affects the cost of the web hosting packages. Paying a higher fee for a website hosting plan, though, does not automatically mean that this plan has a better quality. The best services are the balanced ones, which involve a price that corresponds to the real service which you're getting. Also, we also give a free bonus with the web hosting plan, such as the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of free-of-charge web themes. As a web hosting vendor, we do worry about our good name and that is the reason why if you go with us, you can rest confident that you won't get fooled into purchasing a solution that you cannot actually use.

What should I expect from a shared hosting service?

The shared hosting service is best for individuals who want to host an average site, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of traffic every month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, since as your business grows bigger, your website will become more and more demanding. So, you will have to eventually move to a more powerful website hosting service such as a semi-dedicated servers, a VPS hosting (also known as a virtual web server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when selecting a web hosting supplier, you should also think about scalability, otherwise you might end up moving your domain manually to a different provider, which can cause site troubles and even extended downtime for your website. If you choose AshKloud as your web hosting company, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow, is crucial and will save you a lot of hassles in the long run.