Hosting Uncovered

Hosting is a service that web hosting service providers offer so that you can publish your website online.

How can people see your website?

When you make a web site and you wish other persons to observe it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to render the website visible online by hosting it on your own PC, there is no way for you to keep it always online, which is why website hosting services exist.

How does hosting work?

Hosting companies provide you with disk drive space for your website on their high-power computers (servers) and ensure uninterrupted Internet connection. When somebody writes your website address (e.g. www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the server where they can take a glance at the content of your web site.

Types of web hosting

With the progress of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have appeared to meet the different needs of web site owners, among them shared web hosting services, private virtual web server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most common form of hosting, and is also the easiest to start with. It is a service where one single hosting server is divided among many web hosting account holders who are limited by the CPU, traffic and web server hard disk space quotas that they have been allotted. This form of web hosting is typically less expensive - you don't have to pay for the whole web server upfront, since it is shared among many clients, and the web hosting distributor can afford to offer much lower prices. It is also much easier to use - the hosting server is pre-installed with all the required software and the hosting provider handles all server maintenance procedures and software updates on your behalf.

The drawback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the hosting server's resources with other clients and if a given site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other web sites on that server, but the majority of hosting vendors, including us at Seanic, have protection systems at work that obstruct that from occurring.

A description of a website hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most popular form of web hosting, most hosting distributors and web hosting users simply call it web hosting or website hosting. As there is a huge rivalry on the website hosting marketplace, the majority of hosting firms try to offer moderate prices and bonuses with their services. We, for instance, offer different website hosting plans and two invoicing options - monthly and annual, depending on your resources. If you choose the yearly invoicing cycle, you will receive a present - one cost-free domain registration.

VPS packages

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 hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared web hosting plan, a private virtual web hosting server is a good option. virtual server hosting customers still share the hardware resources of the physical server with other virtual server hosting account owners, but the hard disk is partitioned using special virtualization software so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated web server. The upside is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a virtual private hosting server are not shared. Also, the virtualization technology gives you much more freedom to configure your server, but it also calls for a more advanced degree of technical competence.

Dedicated Package

With the Dedicated Package solution, the customer gets a whole web hosting server and can utilize all its system resources. The dedicated server web hosting solution is the most robust of all website hosting solutions and offers multiple configuration possibilities - the dedicated server hosting clients can select the hardware and software specs that will match their requirements. Dedicated system resources and no-holds-barred performance are among the reasons why a dedicated server hosting package is an excellent choice for a popular corporate web site, for example - you will not share the dedicated server's system resources with anyone else and will receive full root-level access. You will exert full control over the machine, which will permit you to implement any server configuration changes that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated server hosting solution is that a more advanced level of technical proficiency is needed - unless you engage an IT pro, it will be your duty to administer and configure the server. The dedicated hosting solution is also much more expensive, since the cost of the dedicated hosting web server isn't shared between any other users.

A website hosting advice for novices

If you are just starting to create your website and need a web hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution remains the best choice. If your web site outgrows your shared website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for instance, this is very easy and requires no migration of your website files, since only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your website hosting package to a more powerful one at any particular time without worrying about the time remaining before the expiration date. In addition, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it signifies that your website's popularity has increased!), there always is the possibility to move to a virtual hosting server or a dedicated hosting solution without the need to swap web hosting providers.