What Exactly is Hosting?

Hosting is a service that web hosting vendors offer so that you can upload your web site to the World Wide Web.

How can people view your website?

When you set up a website and you want other individuals to view it, you will need to publish (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you try to make the web site available on the web by hosting it on your own computer, there is no way for you to keep it always up and running, which is why web hosting services came into existence.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting firms offer you disk space for your web site on their high-power computers (servers) and ensure constant Internet connectivity. When someone types your web site address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a glimpse at the content of your site.

Types of hosting

With the progress of web technologies, several types of web hosting services have appeared to meet the various requirements of web site owners, including shared web hosting services, private virtual web server hosting services and dedicated web server hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single hosting server is divided among a lot of customers who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web hosting server hard disk storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is typically cheaper - you don't need to purchase the whole web server upfront, since it is divided between many hosting account holders, and the web hosting solutions provider can afford to provide much more moderate prices. It is also easier to use - the server is pre-installed with all the necessary software and the web hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance procedures and security updates for you.

The weak side of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other individuals and if one site becomes really popular it may affect (and slow down) the rest of the websites on that server, but most web hosts, including us at DNMark.com, have security systems at work that obstruct that from taking place.

A definition of a hosting service

Because shared hosting is the most common form of web hosting, the majority of hosting vendors and web hosting clients simply refer to it as hosting or website hosting. As there is an enormous rivalry on the website hosting market, the majority of web hosts endeavor to provide cheap prices and bonuses with their web hosting services. We, for example, provide different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and annual, depending on your funds. If you pick the yearly billing cycle, you will get a gift - one free domain name registration.

VPS plans

VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. The VPS hosting solution is essentially the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. If your web site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting plan, a virtual private web hosting server is an excellent choice. Virtual Private Server web hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other private virtual server web hosting account holders, but the hard drive is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated resources and can be configured almost like an actual dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual hosting server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software offers you much more freedom to configure your VPS, but it also presupposes a higher level of technical competence.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user gets a whole hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated web hosting solution is the most flexible of all hosting solutions and offers lots of configuration possibilities - the dedicated web hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will meet their requirements. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated web hosting plan is an excellent option for a large business web site, for instance - you will not share the web server's system resources with anyone else and will receive complete server root access. You will exercise full authority over the physical machine, which will enable you to implement any configuration changes that you might require. The setback of the dedicated web server hosting solution is that a more advanced degree of technical know-how is needed - unless you employ an IT professional, it will be your obligation to administer and configure the dedicated hosting web server. The dedicated server web hosting solution also costs far more, since the cost of the dedicated hosting server isn't shared between any other clients.

A web hosting advice for novices

If you are just starting to develop your web site and are seeking a website hosting solution to start with, the shared website hosting solution remains the best option. If your website outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can normally upgrade. With us, for instance, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your web site files, because only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting plan to a more advanced one at any given moment without having to worry about the time remaining before expiration. Besides, if you eventually reach the most powerful shared hosting plan and still need more resources (which is great sometimes - it implies that your site's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to migrate to a VPS or a dedicated web server hosting platform without having to switch web hosting service providers.