What is Shared Hosting?

The most archetypal and commonly availed of kind of web hosting is the shared hosting solution. It constitutes a means to host your website without having to understand much about programming and running a hosting server. What's more, it's also the most inexpensive form of hosting and it's in fact affordable for anybody. Nonetheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name hints, the shared hosting service is a form of service where many customers share the system resources of the same web server. This implies that all web server constituents like CPU, hard disks, RAM, network interface cards etc. are distributed among the clients whose accounts are on that very same web hosting server. This is typically made accomplishable by opening different accounts for the different clients and applying specific limitations and quotas for each of them. Those limits are applied so as to prevent the users from meddling with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the hosting server from overloading. Normally, shared hosting customers do not have full root access to the web server's config files, which basically goes to say that they do not have access to anything else on the server but their own website hosting account. The website hosting features that each account may resort to are set by the hosting corporation that owns the web hosting server and by the particular website hosting package. That necessitates the second important question:

How are the shared web hosting servers shared among the users?

Hosting firms that deliver shared hosting services usually have various website hosting packages. Those packages provide different amounts of website hosting resources and specifications, which in fact define the limitations that a web hosting plan will include. The client may choose between the individual web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will fit him best. The web hosting package will then define what limits the user's account will involve, once set up. The costs and the specs of the web hosting plans are determined by the particular hosting supplier. Depending on the politics of the vendor, the shared hosting service falls into two groups - the free hosting solution and the common shared service, currently very famous among "cPanel hosting" distributors as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to claim, which one is better, since they are quite different from one another and they indeed are determined by the business policy of the specific supplier and, of course, the requirements of the specific client.

What is the distinction between the free and the standard shared hosting solution?

Of course, the chief difference between the free of charge and the paid service is in the quantity of resources that they involve. Free web hosting distributors are not capable of keeping a large number of hosting servers, therefore, they just host more customers on a single web hosting server by decreasing the amount of resources provided by the accounts. This will be effective only if the web hosting servers are monitored and tackled appropriately, because the enormous amount of accounts may cause the hosting server to crash repeatedly. Most of the free web hosting providers, though, ignore the quality of the service and therefore, it's quite difficult to stumble upon a free web hosting service that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting distributors commonly provide free technical support even to the free website hosting clients, because they want their websites to get bigger so that they subsequently migrate to a paid website hosting account, which offers more hosting resources. Such provider, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the largest and eldest free hosting vendors in the world.

At the same time, traditional shared hosting vendors such as us, are able to maintain many web servers and so, we may afford to offer much more feature-rich website hosting plans. Of course, that influences the pricing of the website hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web hosting package, though, does not automatically signify that this plan has a finer quality. The best solutions are the balanced ones, which involve a fee that matches the concrete service which you're receiving. Furthermore, we also give a free extra with the web hosting plan, such as the 1-click applications installer, accompanied by 100's of gratis design layouts. As a web hosting vendor, we do look after our good name and that is the reason why if you select us, you can be calm that you won't get duped into purchasing an account that you cannot in fact utilize.

What should I expect from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting solution is best for individuals who are looking to host a standard web page, which is going to use a small or medium amount of bandwidth every month. You cannot anticipate, however, that a shared hosting account will be sufficient for your needs, since as your business enlarges, your website will become more and more demanding. So, you will have to eventually move to a more powerful website hosting service such as a semi-dedicated hosting, a VPS hosting (also known as a virtual server, or VPS), or even a dedicated hosting. Therefore, when choosing a website hosting supplier, you should also think about scalability, or else you might end up relocating your domain manually to a different supplier, which can bring about website problems and even extended downtime for your web page. If you choose iNet Bulgaria as your hosting supplier, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the needed domain name and hosting services as you grow, is crucial and will spare you a lot of headaches in the long run.