What In Fact is Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that hosting firms offer so that you can put your website on the web.

How can people find your web site?

When you create a website and you would like other individuals to spot it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you attempt to render the website reachable on the web by web hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why web hosting services came into being.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting providers provide you with hard drive space for your web site on their high-end computers (web hosting servers) and ensure continuous website accessibility. When somebody writes your domain (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can examine the content of your web site.

Types of hosting

With the advancement of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to fulfill the different needs of web site possessors, among them shared web hosting services, private virtual server web hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single hosting server is shared between many hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and web hosting server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This type of hosting is typically cheaper - you don't have to purchase the entire web server in advance, as it is divided among plenty of hosting users, and the hosting supplier can afford to offer much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting company handles all server maintenance tasks and security updates for you.

The weakness of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other web hosting clients and if one web site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that server, but most hosting providers, including us at Tierra Hosting, have protection platforms at work that hinder that from taking place.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most widely used type of web hosting, the majority of web hosting vendors and hosting customers simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a big competition on the hosting marketplace, most hosting companies endeavor to provide moderate prices and gifts with their services. We, for instance, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and annual, based on your funds. If you choose the annual billing cycle, you will receive a gift - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a private virtual hosting server is an appropriate solution. private virtual server web hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS server web hosting customers, but the disk drive space is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS web server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the customer gets a whole dedicated web hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers countless configuration possibilities - the clients can select the hardware and software specifications that will match their demands. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server is a perfect choice for a resource-requiring business web site, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full server root access. You will have complete authority over the server, which will allow you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical know-how is needed - unless you engage an Information Technology specialist, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated web server isn't shared between any other users.

A web hosting advice for beginners

If you are just starting to develop your site and are searching for a hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most appropriate option. If your web site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your website files, because only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting plan to a more powerful one at any particular moment without having to worry about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. Additionally, if you finally reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still require more resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your website's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS web server hosting platform or a dedicated server web hosting platform without having to switch web hosting service providers.