Web Hosting Packages Explanation

Web hosting is a service that hosting firms provide so that you can put your site on the World Wide Web.

How can people observe your website?

When you build a website and you want other people to spot it, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to render the website available online by web hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services exist.

How does web hosting work?

Hosting distributors offer you disk drive storage space for your website on their high-power computers (servers) and guarantee uninterrupted website availability. When somebody writes your domain (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can have a look at the content of your site.

Web hosting types

With the advance of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into existence to answer the different requirements of web site proprietors, including shared web hosting services, VPS hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where one single hosting server is shared among a lot of customers who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and web content space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of web hosting is generally less expensive - you don't have to buy the entire web server upfront, as it is shared between multiple web hosting users, and the web hosting vendor can afford to offer much lower prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the web hosting company takes care of all server maintenance procedures and software updates for you.

The drawback of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if one web site becomes really busy it may influence (and slow down) all the other websites on that hosting server, but the majority of web hosting distributors, including us at Smart Purple Cloud, have security systems in place that prevent that from happening.

A definition of a hosting service

Since shared web hosting is the most widely used form of web hosting, most web hosting service providers and hosting clients simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the website hosting marketplace, most hosting firms endeavor to offer low prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, offer different web hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you pick the yearly invoicing cycle, you will get a bonus - one free-of-charge domain name registration.

VPS hosting packages

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a virtual private web server package is a possible choice. virtual private web server hosting account holders still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS web server hosting account owners, but the disk drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured practically like an actual dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a private virtual hosting server are not shared. In addition, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your virtual private hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical knowledge.

Dedicated Hosting

With the Dedicated Hosting solution, the user gets an entire dedicated hosting web server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most powerful of all hosting solutions and offers a multitude of customization options - the dedicated server hosting customers can select the hardware and software specs that will match their needs. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are among the reasons why a dedicated hosting plan is a perfect option for a resource-absorbing business site, for instance - you will not share the physical machine's system resources with anyone else and will acquire complete root access. You will have complete control over the server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might require. The disadvantage of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical expertise is needed - unless you engage an IT professional, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more expensive, since the cost of the physical server isn't shared among any other customers.

A website hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just starting to develop your website and need a hosting solution to start with, the shared hosting solution persists to be the most appropriate choice. If your web site grows beyond your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and requires no migration of your web site files, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any particular time without worrying about the time left until expiration. Also, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared website hosting plan and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it indicates that your web site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to switch to a Virtual Private Server hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution without needing to swap hosting providers.