What Indeed is Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that hosting companies offer so that you can publish your web site online.

How can people visit your web site?

When you develop a site and you would like other persons to notice it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a web hosting server. If you attempt to render the site accessible on the World Wide Web by web hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting companies offer you disk storage space for your website on their high-power computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee continuous website accessibility. When someone types your web address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your site.

Hosting varieties

With the growth of online technologies, several types of web hosting services have come into being to satisfy the different needs of web site proprietors, including shared web hosting services, Virtual Private Server web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one server is shared among multiple clients who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and server space quotas that they have been allotted. This type of hosting is generally less expensive - you don't need to buy the whole server in advance, as it is divided among numerous clients, and the web hosting distributor can afford to offer much cheaper prices. It is also much easier to use - the web hosting server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting supplier handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The setback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's system resources with other persons and if one web site becomes very popular it may affect (and slow down) all the other sites on that web hosting server, but the majority of web hosting firms, including us at BlueCap, have protection systems at work that obstruct that from happening.

A definition of a hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most web hosting service providers and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge competition on the hosting market, the majority of web hosting firms endeavor to offer moderate prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for example, offer different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, based on your finances. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a bonus - one free domain registration.

VPS hosting plans

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated server hosting solution. If your website grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a VPS web server hosting plan is a good choice. virtual server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other private virtual server hosting clients, but the hard disk is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. Furthermore, the virtualization technology offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user obtains an entire web server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most reliable of all website hosting solutions and offers loads of configuration possibilities - the dedicated web hosting users can select the hardware and software specs that will answer their demands. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is a perfect choice for a resource-intensive corporate portal, for instance - you will not share the dedicated web hosting server's resources with anyone else and will be granted full server root privileges. You will have full control over the physical machine, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The disadvantage of the dedicated hosting solution is that a higher level of technical competence is required - unless you engage an Information Technology specialist, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated web hosting solution also costs much more, since the cost of the physical machine isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting tip for beginner users

If you are just starting to develop your website and are seeking a hosting solution to start out with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the smartest option. If your web site grows beyond your hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is very easy and requires no migration of your website files, because only the features of your account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the number of days remaining until the expiration date. What is more, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared web hosting package and still require more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your web site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS web hosting platform or a dedicated web server hosting platform without the need to change web hosting service providers.