What is Shared Web Hosting?
The most fundamental and popularly used type of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It's a means to host your web portal without having to know much about programming and administrating a web server. Moreover, it's also the most economical form of website hosting and it's indeed affordable for anybody. Nevertheless, what is shared hosting?
What is shared hosting?
As the name indicates, the shared hosting solution is a sort of service where lots of users share the reserves of one and the same web server. This means that all server constituents like CPU, hard disk drives, RAM, network interface cards and so on, are divided among the users whose accounts are on that very same server. This is mostly rendered accomplishable by creating separate accounts for the separate clients and applying specific restrictions and quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are appointed in order to restrain the customers from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the server from overburdening. Usually, shared hosting clients do not have complete root access to the server's configuration files, which principally indicates that they do not have access to anything else on the server apart from their own personal hosting account. The website hosting resources that each account may utilize are fixed by the web hosting distributor that possesses the web server and by the respective web hosting package. That leads to the second essential question:
How are the shared web hosting servers divided among the users?
Hosting vendors that furnish shared hosting services usually have diverse website hosting plans. Those plans involve different amounts of web hosting resources and specifications, which in fact determine the restrictions that a web hosting account will include. The customer may choose between the different web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he believes will fit him best. The hosting plan will then define what restrictions the client's account will have, once set up. The prices and the specifications of the web hosting packages are specified by the given hosting vendor. Based on the policy of the distributor, the shared hosting service can be divided into 2 categories - the free hosting solution and the common shared service, most recently very popular among "cPanel hosting" companies as a cloud web hosting one. It's impossible to say, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they indeed are subject to the marketing policy of the particular corporation and, of course, the demands of the particular customer.
What is the distinction between the free and the typical shared hosting service?
Of course, the primary difference between the free of charge and the paid solution is in the amount of features that they offer. Free website hosting providers are not capable of maintaining a big number of hosting servers, therefore, they plainly host more customers on one single web hosting server by decreasing the amount of system resources provided by the accounts. This will be effective only if the web hosting servers are supervised and tackled appropriately, because the huge number of accounts may cause the server to crash time and time again. The majority of the free web hosting providers, however, neglect the quality of the service and therefore, it's quite tough to come across a free of charge website hosting solution that's actually worth the time. The top free hosting suppliers commonly provide free customer support even to the free hosting customers, since they want their sites to expand so that they eventually move to a paid website hosting plan, which includes more web hosting features. One such distributor, for example, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and oldest free web hosting vendors worldwide.
On the other hand, established shared hosting vendors such as us, may afford to keep plenty of hosting servers and hence, we may afford to provide much more feature-rich hosting packages. Of course, that reflects on the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a website hosting package, though, does not automatically denote that this package has a finer quality. The most advantageous solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a price that matches the actual service which you're receiving. Moreover, we also provide a free extra with the website hosting package, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of free web page layouts. As a website hosting provider, we do care about our good name and that's why if you select us, you can rest calm that you won't get hoaxed into paying for a plan that you cannot in fact use.
What should I expect from a shared hosting service?
The shared hosting service is best for individuals who wish to host an average web site, which is going to use a small or medium amount of bandwidth every month. You cannot expect, however, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, because as your business expands, your website will become more and more demanding. Hence, you will have to ultimately migrate to a more powerful web hosting solution like a semi-dedicated hosting, a VPS hosting (also known as a virtual server, or VPS), or even a dedicated hosting. Therefore, when picking a hosting distributor, you should also ponder about scalability, or else you might end up transferring your domain manually to a separate provider, which can bring about website troubles and even extended downtime for your web portal. If you select ZBest Hosting as your website hosting distributor, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the required domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is crucial and will spare you lots of troubles in the future.
Enterprise | Corporate | Business Starter |
Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage |
Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth |
Unlimited websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | 5 websites hosted |
30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial |
$21.25 / month | $17.08 / month | $8.75 / month |