How Hosting Operates

Hosting is a service that hosting vendors offer so that you can upload your website to the Internet.

How can people find your site?

When you create a web site and you would like other individuals to check it out, you will have to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to make the site available on the Internet by hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why website hosting services exist.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting providers offer you data storage space for your site on their high-power computers (web servers) and guarantee constant network connectivity. When someone writes your domain (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the web hosting server where they can have a peek at the content of your site.

Types of hosting

With the growth of online technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to match the various requirements of web site possessors, among them shared website hosting services, virtual server hosting services and dedicated hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single hosting server is shared between a lot of web hosting customers who are limited by the CPU, bandwidth and server disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of hosting is typically cheaper - you don't have to buy the whole hosting server upfront, as it is divided between multiple web hosting clients, and the web hosting provider can afford to provide much more reasonable prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the required software and the hosting solutions provider handles all server maintenance procedures and security updates for you.

The negative side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's system resources with other shared web hosting account holders and if a given site becomes very busy it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the sites on that web server, but most hosting service providers, including us at Mindfox Hosting Solutions, have security platforms at work that hinder that from occurring.

A definition of a hosting service

Since shared website hosting is the most popular type of web hosting, most web hosting suppliers and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a great competition on the web hosting marketplace, most web hosting suppliers try to provide reasonable prices and gifts with their hosting services. We, for example, provide different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your finances. If you select the annual billing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one cost-free domain name registration.

VPS packages

VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is basically the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. If your web site grows beyond the resources offered by your shared website hosting plan, a virtual private hosting server package is a good choice. VPS hosting clients still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual web server hosting account holders, but the hard drive is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the memory on a virtual web server are not shared. Moreover, the virtualization technology gives you much more autonomy to configure your VPS web server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical expertise.

Dedicated Package

With the Dedicated Package solution, the user gets a whole physical machine and can use all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers plenty of configuration options - the dedicated web server hosting users can pick the hardware and software specs that will fulfill their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated hosting web server is a perfect solution for a content-heavy business web portal, for example - you will not share the dedicated hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will obtain root-level access. You will exercise complete authority over the web hosting server, which will allow you to implement any configuration changes that you might require. The drawback of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical proficiency is needed - unless you employ an Information Technology specialist, you will be responsible for administering and configuring the physical machine. The dedicated web server hosting solution also costs far more, because the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared among any other customers.

A website hosting recommendation for beginner users

If you are just starting to set up your site and are seeking a web hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution remains the most logical option. If your web site outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your data, since 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 time left before expiration. Besides, if you eventually reach the most advanced shared web hosting package and still require more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it signifies that your web site's popularity has risen!), there always is the option to switch to a VPS web hosting platform or a dedicated web hosting platform without the need to switch web hosting providers.