Shared Hosting Unmasked

If you have decided to make your very own web site, but are not very sure about what a web site is and are not aware of the expression "shared hosting", this article is devoted to explaining these notions in simple English.

What exactly is a website?

A website is an amalgamation of webpages assembled in a systematic fashion. It has a unique address, also called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). A site may be comprised of only one webpage and sometimes may even contain as many as a thousand pages.

What is a web hosting server?

A hosting server enables you to upload your website onto it. In some instances, there might be even 1000's of web sites on a single web hosting server. The hosting server basically is a computer with specific hardware, which is stored in a datacenter with special cooling systems, whose task is to ensure the seamless performance of the hosting server and all the sites hosted on it.

In brief, a web hosting server will be indeed a launching pad when the time arrives for you to launch your web site. It could be any kind of web site - a corporate web site containing a huge number of pages, or a website, which is comprised of only a few pages and which you have created just for your pals and family members.

You've decided what your website will be, now what?

Once you have made a decision about what kind of web site you want to establish, the next step is to discover what kind of web hosting service you have to choose for your web endeavor. Basically, there are two sorts of website hosting services - free website hosting services and professional paid hosting services. The free-of-charge hosting solution is ordinarily utilized by clients that do not have a business-related website.

Strengths and weaknesses of the free hosting solution

You will not receive lots of options with a charge-free web hosting plan. Features such as traffic, RAM memory and hosting storage space are restricted and inadequate for a complex e-store or a business website, or even for a web site with lots of graphics. What's more, there are a lot of ads embedded on your web site by the web hosting services provider. These adverts take up a lot of space on your website and are very frustrating.

Shared web hosting

The professional paid shared web hosting services tend to be more stable and include numerous sophisticated features aside from the high-power web hosting server that will host your website and its content. Nonetheless, it is important to find out which features your website needs before purchasing your web hosting plan. You should not rush and end up paying for something that your website does not need.

Find your web hosting packages provider

It is not hard to find a hosting provider. You need to simply carry out an online search in order to find a web hosting provider that satisfies your website's demands. Before you take your actual decision, have a glance at the parameters of the web hosting plans offered by the hosting providers that have made an impression on you. We, for instance, are among the leading hosting service providers on the market now. The immense array of services and our prices are what renders us an attractive choice. In spite of that, you must ascertain what type of web hosting solution you need and if the price matches your allowance. Furthermore, you must not forget to examine the web hosting vendor's ToS prior to signing up to make certain that your site is not violating them.

Signing up for a hosting account

As soon as you have found out what features are ideal for your site, the next move is to open an account with the web hosting distributor of your preference. You will get all the needed tools for managing your website files and databases. With us, for example, you will obtain a Control Panel, which is comprised of domain, website, database and mail account administration sections. You log into the hosting Control Panel using your unique username and password, which grants you secure access to the portion of the hosting server where your web site will be located.

Uploading your website

You can either upload your website files through an FTP client or, as is with most hosting vendors, through a web-based tool that is included within the Control Panel. With us, the File Manager is extremely easy to use and offers features similar to those observed in Windows Explorer, which makes file manipulation very easy. We offer also a site building tool and a PHP-powered script installer, which you can use to develop your web site if you have no programming expertise and are taking your very first steps in web design. The web-based site building tool, dubbed SiteStudio, will also save you the time and effort of making a web site on your PC and then uploading it using FTP client software or the File Manager tool.