Hosting Explanation

Hosting is a service that hosting providers offer so that you can put your site on the Internet.

How can people open your web site?

When you develop a site and you wish other people to discern it, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a hosting server. If you attempt to make the website accessible on the web by hosting it on your own personal computer, there is no way for you to keep it constantly up and running, which is why website hosting services came into being.

How does hosting work?

Web hosting companies offer you hard drive storage space for your web site on their powerful computers (web hosting servers) and ensure uninterrupted service uptime. When somebody types your URL (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's address bar, they will be connected to the web server where they can see the content of your website.

Hosting types

With the development of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into existence to match the different demands of website owners, including shared hosting services, virtual private web server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.

Shared website hosting

Shared website hosting is the most popular form of hosting, and is also the easiest to commence with. It is a service where a single hosting server is divided between many hosting clients who are restricted by the CPU, bandwidth and web server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been allocated. This form of website hosting is commonly cheaper - you don't have to purchase the entire web hosting server upfront, as it is divided between plenty of users, and the web hosting supplier can afford to offer much more affordable prices. It is also much easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the hosting provider takes care of all server maintenance tasks and software updates on your behalf.

The drawback of the shared web hosting solution is that you share the server's resources with other web hosting account holders and if one site becomes very busy it may affect (and slow down) all the other websites on that server, but the majority of hosting distributors, including us at Panther Computers, have protection systems at work that prevent that from happening.

A description of a web hosting service

Because shared website hosting is the most common form of web hosting, the majority of web hosting firms and web hosting users simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a great rivalry on the hosting market, most web hosting providers endeavor to provide affordable prices and gifts with their web hosting services. We, for example, provide different website hosting plans and two billing options - monthly and yearly, based on your resources. If you choose the annual billing cycle, you will get a present - one cost-free domain name registration.

VPS plans

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 hosting solution. If your site outgrows the resources offered by your shared website hosting account, a Virtual Private Server web hosting plan is an excellent choice. VPS server hosting account owners still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS hosting customers, but the server is partitioned using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own dedicated system resources and can be configured almost like a full-fledged dedicated server. The upside is that the CPU and the memory on a VPS web hosting server are not shared. Besides, the virtualization software gives you much more autonomy to configure your VPS hosting server, but it also presupposes a more advanced degree of technical know-how.

Dedicated Server

With the Dedicated Server solution, the user obtains an entire dedicated web hosting server and can use all its resources. The dedicated server hosting solution is the most flexible of all web hosting solutions and offers a multitude of configuration options - the dedicated server web hosting clients can choose the hardware and software specs that will match their needs. Dedicated resources and guaranteed performance are two reasons why a dedicated server hosting plan is an excellent choice for a high resource-swallowing business web site, for instance - you will not share the dedicated hosting web server's resources with anyone else and will be granted root-level access. You will have full control over the web hosting server, which will enable you to implement any server configuration modifications that you might need. The disadvantage of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical knowledge is required - unless you engage an Information Technology pro, you will be responsible for managing and configuring the dedicated hosting server. The dedicated web server hosting solution is also far more costly, since the cost of the dedicated server isn't shared between any other clients.

A hosting recommendation for novices

If you are just beginning to create your site and need a hosting solution to commence with, the shared website hosting solution remains the best option. If your site outgrows your website hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not necessitate migration of your data, since only the features of your web hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more advanced one at any given time without worrying about the time left until expiration. Moreover, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting package and still need more system resources (which is great sometimes - it means that your site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the option to migrate to a VPS server web hosting platform or a dedicated web hosting solution without needing to change web hosting providers.