What Does Shared Hosting Mean?

The most primary and popularly utilized type of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It's a way to host your web portal without having to know much about programming and operating a web server. What's more, it's also the most inexpensive form of website hosting and it's indeed affordable for everybody. Still, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name signifies, the shared hosting service is a sort of service where lots of users share the system resources of one and the same web hosting server. This denotes that all web server components like CPU, hard disks, RAM, NICs and so on, are distributed among the customers whose accounts are on that same server. This is mostly rendered feasible by setting up different accounts for the separate clients and assigning some limits and usage quotas for each of them. Those limits are set in order to restrain the clients 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 hosting server's config files, which primarily goes to say that they do not have access to anything else on the server but their own web hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may resort to are fixed by the hosting vendor that owns the web server and by the particular web hosting plan. That gives rise to the second important question:

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

Hosting suppliers that deliver shared hosting accounts typically have different website hosting packages. Those packages contain different quotas of website hosting resources and specifications, which actually define the limits that a web hosting plan will include. The customer may pick 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 determine what limits the client's account will have, once set up. The prices and the specs of the website hosting plans are fixed by the actual web hosting supplier. Based on the policy of the distributor, the shared hosting service falls into 2 groups - the free hosting service and the normal shared solution, currently very famous among "cPanel hosting" retailers as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to announce, which one is more preferable, since they are quite different from each other and they indeed are dependent on the marketing strategy of the given supplier and, of course, the needs of the given user.

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

Of course, the primary difference between the free of cost and the paid service is in the amount of features that they contain. Free web hosting distributors are not capable of keeping an enormous amount of web servers, hence, they plainly accommodate more users on one hosting server by lowering the amount of system resources provided by the accounts. This will be effective only if the web servers are monitored and dealt with appropriately, since the enormous amount of accounts may causer the web server to crash over and over again. The majority of the free website hosting distributors, though, neglect the quality of the service and hence, it's quite hard to find a free website hosting service that's in fact worth the time. The top free hosting companies normally offer free technical support even to the free hosting customers, because they want their websites to expand so that they subsequently migrate to a paid hosting account, which offers more hosting features. Such distributor, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is one of the largest and eldest free website hosting firms in the world.

At the same time, established shared hosting distributors like us, may afford to keep lots of web hosting servers and therefore, we are able to offer much more powerful web hosting plans. Of course, that influences the pricing of the hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web hosting account, though, does not automatically signify that this service has a finer quality. The most advantageous services are the balanced ones, which offer a fee that matches the real service which you're obtaining. Additionally, we also give a free extra with the website hosting package, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by 100's of free web templates. As a web hosting corporation, we do look after our reputation and that's why if you choose us, you can be assured that you won't get duped into purchasing an account that you cannot actually make use of.

What should I expect from a shared hosting service?

The shared hosting service is best for persons who wish to host a normal web portal, which is going to consume a small or medium amount of bandwidth every month. You cannot anticipate, though, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, because as your business enlarges, your web page will become more and more resource consuming. Therefore, you will have to ultimately migrate to a more powerful website hosting service such as a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (aka a virtual server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. So, when selecting a web hosting distributor, you should also reflect about scalability, or else you might end up moving your domain manually to a different supplier, which can bring about web site predicaments and even prolonged downtime for your web site. If you select Acken Host as your web hosting vendor, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow bigger, is crucial and will save you lots of headaches in the future.