Hosting Plans Explanation

Hosting is a service that hosting firms offer so that you can upload your site to the web.

How can people check out your site?

When you set up a site and you wish other people to check it out, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the website available on the web by hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting service providers provide you with hard drive space for your site on their high-end computers (web hosting servers) and ensure constant Internet connection. When somebody types your domain name (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the hosting server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your site.

Web hosting varieties

With the growth of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various demands of web site proprietors, including shared web hosting services, private virtual server hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared web hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one server is divided between lots of shared web hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and web server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been allotted. This type of website hosting is generally less expensive - you don't have to purchase the whole web hosting server upfront, since it is divided between plenty of web hosting customers, and the web hosting provider can afford to provide much more affordable prices. It is also easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the web hosting distributor handles all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The negative side of the shared hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other web hosting account holders and if one web site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting firms, including us at WideMarsh.com, have protection systems in place that hinder that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most commonly used form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting providers and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the hosting marketplace, most web hosting firms strive to offer cheap prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different website hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one free domain registration.

VPS plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a private virtual server package is a suitable solution. VPS server hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other virtual server web hosting account holders, but the hard disk space is split up using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization technology gives you much more freedom to configure your private virtual web server, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the client gets a whole physical server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most flexible of all hosting solutions and offers a lot of configuration options - the dedicated web hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will satisfy their needs. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated server web hosting package is a perfect option for a heavy-content corporate web portal, for instance - you will not share the web server's system resources with anyone else and will acquire full server root access. You will have full authority over the server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a higher level of technical know-how is required - unless you employ an IT professional, it will be your obligation to manage and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated hosting solution also costs much more, since the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared between any other users.

A hosting advice for beginners

If you are just beginning to build your site and are seeking a website hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the most logical choice. If your web site grows beyond your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your files, because only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without worrying about the number of days left before expiration. What is more, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still require more system resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your site's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to switch to a virtual private web server or a dedicated hosting web server without needing to change hosting service providers.