Definition of Website Hosting

Website hosting is a service that web hosting service providers provide so that you can upload your site to the Internet.

How can people discern your web site?

When you make a website and you want other individuals to spot it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a server. If you try to render the site available on the Internet by website hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it constantly online, which is why website hosting services came into existence.

How does website hosting work?

Web hosting firms provide you with hard disk space for your web site on their powerful computers (web servers) and guarantee uninterrupted network connectivity. When someone types your web site address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can have a glance at the content of your web site.

Types of web hosting

With the development of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into being to satisfy the different demands of web site possessors, among them shared website hosting services, VPS server web hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared web hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single web server is divided between lots of shared hosting account owners who are limited by the CPU, web traffic and hosting server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This type of web hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't need to buy the whole web server upfront, since it is shared among plenty of users, and the hosting provider can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also much easier to use - the server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.

The downside of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other individuals and if one site becomes really popular it may influence (and slow down) the rest of the web sites on that hosting server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at Africa Hosting Server, have protection systems at work that impede that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most common type of web hosting, the majority of web hosting distributors and hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is an immense competition on the web hosting marketplace, most web hosting providers strive to provide modest prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for example, offer different hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your budget. If you select the yearly invoicing cycle, you will obtain a gift - one free-of-charge domain registration.

VPS web hosting

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS web hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. If your website outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting package, a private virtual hosting server plan is a suitable choice. VPS web server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other VPS web hosting account holders, but the disk space is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured practically like a real dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS server are not shared. Also, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual web server, but it also presupposes a more advanced level of technical proficiency.

Dedicated Web Hosting

With the Dedicated Web Hosting solution, the client obtains an entire dedicated server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most flexible of all website hosting solutions and offers many configuration possibilities - the dedicated server web hosting customers can select the hardware and software specifications that will match their demands. Dedicated system resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated hosting server is a perfect option for a heavy resource-devouring corporate website, for instance - you will not share the dedicated hosting server's resources with anyone else and will get complete root-level access. You will exert full authority over the server, which will permit you to implement any server configuration changes that you might require. The downside of the dedicated hosting solution is that a higher level of technical proficiency is needed - unless you hire an IT specialist, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated web hosting solution is also much more expensive, because the cost of the server isn't shared between any other customers.

A hosting recommendation for beginners

If you are just beginning to set up your site and are searching for a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared hosting solution remains the most logical option. If your web site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your website files, since only the parameters of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any given time without having to worry about the number of days left until the expiration date. Also, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared web hosting plan and still need more system resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it implies that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to switch to a private virtual web server hosting platform or a dedicated hosting web server without needing to swap hosting providers.