What Indeed is Shared Website Hosting?

The most standard and popularly used form of web hosting is the shared hosting service. It represents a means to host your web site without having to know much about programming and administrating a server. Moreover, it's also the cheapest type of website hosting and it's indeed affordable for everyone. Nevertheless, what is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting?

As the name designates, the shared hosting service is a type of service where lots of users share the resources of the same web hosting server. This means that all hosting server elements such as CPU, hard drives, RAM, NICs and so on, are apportioned among the clients whose accounts are on that very same hosting server. This is usually rendered possible by opening separate accounts for the separate clients and imposing specific restrictions and resource usage quotas for each of them. Those restrictions are allocated so as to hinder the users from intervening with each other's accounts and, of course, to prevent the server from overloading. Normally, shared hosting customers do not have root access to the server's configuration files, which primarily suggests that they cannot access anything else on the server aside from their own web hosting account. The web hosting features that each account may resort to are set by the web hosting distributor that owns the server and by the particular web hosting plan. That brings about the second important question:

How are the shared hosting servers shared among the users?

Web hosting distributors that supply shared hosting packages normally have different web hosting packages. Those packages provide different quotas of hosting features and specs, which actually define the restrictions that a website hosting package will include. The client may choose between the different web hosting plans and sign up for the one that he thinks will fit him best. The web hosting plan will then determine what limitations the user's account will have, once opened. The costs and the specifications of the web hosting plans are defined by the given hosting vendor. Depending on the policy of the firm, the shared hosting solution falls into 2 categories - the free hosting solution and the common shared solution, currently very popular among "cPanel hosting" retailers as a cloud web hosting one. It's not possible to judge, which one is better, since they are very different from one another and they indeed depend on the business policy of the given vendor and, of course, the requirements of the specific user.

What is the distinction between the free and the classic shared hosting service?

Of course, the essential difference between the free of cost and the paid service is in the amount of resources that they contain. Free website hosting vendors are not able to maintain a large number of servers, therefore, they just host more customers on one single hosting server by decreasing the quantity of system resources provided by the accounts. This will be effective only in case the hosting servers are supervised and maintained appropriately, because the great amount of accounts may make the web server crash time and time again. Most of the free website hosting corporations, though, overlook the quality of the service and hence, it's quite hard to come across a free of charge web hosting service that's actually worth the effort. The top free hosting vendors usually provide free customer support even to the free web hosting users, since they want their web portals to expand so that they eventually move to a paid web hosting package, which includes more website hosting features. Such provider, for instance, is FreeHostia.com, which is among the biggest and oldest free website hosting firms worldwide.

On the other hand, established shared hosting firms such as us, are able to maintain numerous web servers and so, we are able to provide much more powerful web hosting packages. Of course, that reflects on the cost of the hosting packages. Paying a higher price for a web hosting package, though, does not automatically denote that this solution has a finer quality. The most optimal solutions are the balanced ones, which offer a price that corresponds to the concrete service which you're getting. Also, we also give a free bonus with the web hosting plan, like the 1-click applications installer, complemented with hundreds of free-of-charge web site themes. As a website hosting distributor, we do care about our good name and that is the reason why if you go with us, you can be assured that you won't get fooled into purchasing a service that you cannot in fact avail of.

What should I anticipate from a shared hosting solution?

The shared hosting service is best for persons who desire to host a normal website, which is going to swallow a small or medium amount of web traffic each month. You cannot expect, though, that a shared hosting account will last you a lifetime, since as your business expands, your site will become more and more resource consuming. Therefore, you will have to ultimately upgrade to a more feature-rich web hosting solution such as a semi-dedicated servers, a virtual private servers (aka a virtual server, or VPS), or even a dedicated server. Therefore, when selecting a web hosting company, you should also reflect about scalability, otherwise you might end up moving your domain manually to a different vendor, which can cause site complications and even prolonged downtime for your web site. If you select Elias Store as your hosting supplier, you can rest safe that we can supply you with the required domain name and hosting services as you get bigger, is crucial and will save you lots of inconveniences in the future.