Shared Web Hosting and Services	Visited: 774 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Ed Dunham June 04, 2007

Web hosting is offered to the consumer in multiple formats based upon the user's requirements. Web hosting is a primary service that consumers can utilize after obtaining either dial-up or broadband access to the Internet. Web hosting is in essence a subscription service. The most cost effective way of web hosting is shared web hosting. Shared web hosting is actually the most popular type of web hosting service. Cheap web hosting is certainly not created equally. Another advantage to shared web hosting is that the client is responsible for little, if any, server maintanence or management.

Hosting

Hosting services limited to the Web:Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting. Hosting companies usually require that you own your own domain name in order to host with them. Hosting companies charge a rental fee for the service of storing your Web site and allowing Web site visitor traffic flow to through their computers to get to the information on your site. Hosting has become ridiculously cheap in recent years, and there are plenty of shady operations competing on price. Hosting packages comes with enough space and features to match most users needs. Hosting companies offer shared hosting to customers with websites that have small or moderate traffic levels. Hosting companies monitor shared servers for abuse and resource hogging, sometimes malicious scripts or bad code can cause it to stop functioning, shutting down every website on the server. Hosting can be for many online marketers a fantastic way to generate revenue.

Server

Webhosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation. cPanel, Hosting Controller, Plesk or others) for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Shared web hosting service: one's Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server. Virtual Dedicated Server: slicing up a server into virtual servers. Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. While each client has theirown limits on certain things (storage space, allowed email accounts, allowedbandwidth per month, allowed FTP accounts), the same Apache server, MySQLserver, and even physical memory are shared. Because you are sharing resources,it's possible to use the server hardware to it's full potential, translatinginto affordable pricing for the client.

Service

Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet.

Business

The webhosting client may want to have other services, such as email for his business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A Web host, or hosting service provider (HSP), is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for Web sites to be viewed on the Web. Unfortunately, owning and operating a Web server can be very costly and requires technical expertise that most businesses do not possess. Many individuals and small businesses take advantage of Web hosts in order to free themselves from pre-occupying their scarce human and financial resources on Web host issues. Typically, an individual or small to mid-sized businesscannot afford to independently obtain an extremely robust connection to theInternet for their Web presence.

Servers

Webhosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation. Sharedservers provide individual Web sites with redundant connectivity andguaranteed uptime. An established web hosting company will generally own many web servers which in turn host many websites. Across the world there are many more websites than there are web servers because it is possible to host thousands of small websites on one web server. You may be able to set up your own servers at home, but can you for less than $8/month. Even if my cable providor allowed customers to run servers, the upstream rate is only a fraction of a megabit, and there are lots of hops from my boxes to the backbone. You are prohibited to run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers.

Web hosting is a rapidly changing and competitive business. For users that do not want to have the burden of running a sever, shared web hosting is a great choice. While not the perfect solution for everyone, for many people shared web hosting is an attractive option to consider. The key to finding reliable web hosting is to do your homework.