Shared Hosting Definition

Shared hosting is a service that web hosting distributors offer so that you can upload your site online.

How can people see your website?

When you set up a site and you would like other persons to visit it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the website discoverable on the Internet by shared hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it online all the time, which is why website hosting services appeared.

How does shared hosting work?

Hosting providers offer you content storage space for your web site on their powerful computers (web servers) and guarantee constant Internet access. When someone writes your website address (for instance www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can take a glance at the content of your web site.

Hosting varieties

With the development of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have emerged to answer the different requirements of website owners, among them shared web hosting services, Virtual Private Server web hosting services and dedicated server web hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where a single web server is shared among multiple web hosting customers who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and web server disk drive space quotas that they have been assigned. This form of hosting is normally less expensive - you don't need to buy the whole hosting server upfront, since it is shared between multiple hosting users, and the hosting distributor can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting company handles all server maintenance tasks and software updates for you.

The downside of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other web hosting customers and if a given website becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting providers, including us at The Gate, have protection platforms in place that prevent that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most widely used form of web hosting, most hosting providers and hosting customers simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge competition on the website hosting marketplace, most hosting distributors strive to offer reasonable prices and bonuses with their services. We, for example, provide different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you pick the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a gift - one free domain name registration.

Virtual private servers plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The Virtual private servers hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server web hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared hosting plan, a VPS web hosting package is a good choice. virtual server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual private web server hosting account holders, but the physical server is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer obtains a whole dedicated hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all web hosting solutions and offers many customization possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting customers can pick the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their needs. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web server is a perfect option for a high resource-swallowing business website, for example - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will be given complete server root access. You will exert complete authority over the machine, which will allow you to implement any server configuration changes that you might need. The weakness of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical know-how is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology specialist, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the physical server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also far more expensive, because the cost of the dedicated web hosting server isn't shared among any other customers.

A web hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just beginning to create your website and are seeking a hosting solution to start with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most relevant choice. If your site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and does not involve migration of your files, because only the parameters of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any given time without having to worry about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. Besides, if you finally reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a private virtual web server or a dedicated web hosting platform without having to change web hosting providers.