Web Hosting Description

Web hosting is a service that hosting firms offer so that you can put your site on the World Wide Web.

How can people view your web site?

When you build a site and you wish other persons to visit it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to render the site visible online by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why web hosting services appeared.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting providers provide you with hard disk storage space for your site on their high-end computers (web servers) and ensure constant service uptime. When someone types your web site address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can see the content of your web site.

Web hosting varieties

With the advancement of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to meet the different needs of website possessors, including shared website hosting services, VPS server web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where a single web server is shared among plenty of clients who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and web server hard disk space quotas that they have been assigned. This type of website hosting is usually cheaper - you don't need to purchase the whole web server upfront, as it is divided among many web hosting customers, and the web hosting company can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting services provider handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The weak side of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other web hosting users and if one site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that hosting server, but most web hosting providers, including us at Tierra Hosting, have protection systems at work that obstruct that from occurring.

A description of a web hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most common form of web hosting, most hosting companies and hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is an extensive competition on the web hosting marketplace, the majority of web hosting providers strive to offer moderate prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting packages and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your funds. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will get a present - one free-of-charge domain registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared hosting package, a virtual private hosting server plan is a possible option. private virtual server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS hosting clients, but the physical machine is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web hosting server are not shared. What's more, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer gets an entire web server and can utilize all its resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers lots of customization options - the dedicated server web hosting customers can select the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting plan is a perfect choice for a content-heavy corporate web site, for example - you will not share the server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full server root access. You will have complete control over the server, which will allow you to make any server configuration changes that you might require. The downside of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical competence is required - unless you engage an IT specialist, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated server web hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other clients.

A hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to develop your web site and are seeking a website hosting solution to commence with, the shared hosting solution remains the most logical option. If your website grows beyond your hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your files, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the time left before expiration. Besides, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to move to a virtual server or a dedicated web hosting platform without needing to change web hosting service providers.