How Hosting Services Works

Hosting is a service that hosting companies provide so that you can upload your website online.

How can people discover your web site?

When you develop a web site and you wish other people to notice it, you will have to publish (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the web site reachable on the World Wide Web by hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it up and running all the time, which is why hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting firms provide you with disk drive storage space for your web site on their powerful computers (servers) and guarantee uninterrupted website availability. When someone writes your URL (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can see the content of your web site.

Hosting varieties

With the development of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have emerged to meet the various requirements of website proprietors, among them shared website hosting services, Virtual Private Server web 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 begin with. It is a service where one web hosting server is shared among a lot of shared hosting account owners who are restricted by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of website hosting is usually less expensive - you don't need to purchase the entire web hosting server upfront, since it is shared among plenty of web hosting account owners, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting vendor takes care of all server maintenance tasks and security updates on your behalf.

The downside of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other clients and if a given website becomes really busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other websites on that web server, but most web hosting providers, including us at Hunza Web, have security systems in place that prevent that from taking place.

A definition of a website hosting service

Because shared web hosting is the most commonly used type of web hosting, the majority of web hosts and web hosting customers simply refer to it as web hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous competition on the website hosting marketplace, most web hosting service providers endeavor to provide reasonable prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your resources. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will obtain a bonus - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS services

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting plan, a Virtual Private Server plan is an appropriate option. Virtual Private Server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS server hosting account holders, but the disk drive space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated web hosting server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual web server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private web hosting server, but it also calls for a more advanced level of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user gets an entire physical server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most reliable of all hosting solutions and offers a myriad of configuration options - the customers can pick the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting server is an excellent option for a high resource-devouring business web site, for instance - you will not share the hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will be bestowed with full root access. You will exercise full authority over the server, which will allow you to make any server configuration changes that you might need. The setback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical expertise is needed - unless you hire an Information Technology professional, it will be your duty to manage and configure the dedicated web server. The dedicated server web hosting solution is also much more expensive, because the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared among any other users.

A website hosting tip for beginners

If you are just beginning to develop your website and are looking for a web hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most sensible option. If your web site grows beyond 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 data, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more advanced one at any particular moment without having to worry about the remaining time before expiration. Also, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it signifies that your web site's popularity has increased!), there always is the option to switch to a virtual private web hosting server or a dedicated hosting web server without needing to swap web hosting service providers.