What Precisely is Hosting?
Hosting is a service that hosting companies offer so that you can publish your website on the Internet.
How can people find your site?
When you develop a web site and you wish other persons to check it out, you will need to copy (or upload) it to a web server. If you try to render the site reachable 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 distributors provide you with content storage space for your site on their high-power computers (web hosting servers) and guarantee continuous website availability. When somebody types your website address (for example www.my-best-domain.com) in their web browser's URL bar, they will be connected to the server where they can explore the content of your website.
Hosting varieties
With the growth of web technologies, different types of web hosting services have come into existence to meet the different requirements of web site possessors, among them shared website hosting services, virtual web server hosting services and dedicated web hosting services.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is the most widely used type of hosting, and is also the easiest to begin with. It is a service where one single hosting server is divided between numerous shared web hosting account holders who are restricted by the CPU, web traffic and hosting server hard drive storage space quotas that they have been apportioned. This form of hosting is typically cheaper - you don't need to purchase the whole web hosting server in advance, since it is shared between lots of hosting account holders, and the web hosting provider can afford to provide much cheaper prices. It is also easier to use - the web server is pre-configured with all the necessary software and the web hosting provider handles all server maintenance procedures and security updates on your behalf.
The weak side of the shared website hosting solution is that you share the web hosting server's resources with other shared web hosting account owners and if one web site becomes very popular it may influence (and slow down) all the other sites on that server, but the majority of hosting companies, including us at Mnistrat Hosting, have protection systems at work that prevent that from occurring.
A description of a website hosting service
Since shared website hosting is the most common type of web hosting, most web hosting service providers and web hosting users simply call it hosting or website hosting. As there is a considerable competition on the web hosting market, the majority of web hosting firms endeavor to offer modest prices and gifts with their services. We, for example, offer different web hosting packages and two billing options - monthly and yearly, depending on your resources. If you choose the annual invoicing cycle, you will receive a bonus - one free domain registration.
VPS plans
VPS is an abbreviation of 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 website hosting plan, a VPS web server hosting plan is an excellent solution. virtual server web hosting users still share the hardware resources of the physical machine with other VPS web server hosting clients, but the hard disk is split up using a special virtualization technology so that each partition has its own guaranteed resources and can be configured practically like a full-fledged dedicated web hosting server. The advantage is that the CPU and the RAM memory on a VPS server are not shared. Additionally, the virtualization software offers you much more autonomy to configure your private virtual web hosting server, but it also calls for a higher level of technical proficiency.
Dedicated Server
With the Dedicated Server solution, the customer gets a whole dedicated web hosting server and can use all its system resources. The dedicated hosting solution is the most robust of all web hosting solutions and offers a lot of customization options - the dedicated server web hosting users can pick the hardware and software specifications that will fulfill their demands. Dedicated resources and no-holds-barred performance are two reasons why a dedicated web hosting package is an excellent option for a resource-consuming corporate website, for instance - you will not share the web hosting server's system resources with anyone else and will get full server root access. You will exercise complete control over the physical machine, which will enable you to make any server configuration modifications that you might need. The drawback of the dedicated web hosting solution is that a higher degree of technical know-how is required - unless you hire an Information Technology specialist, it will be your responsibility to manage and configure the dedicated web hosting server. The dedicated hosting solution also costs much more, since the cost of the dedicated web hosting server isn't shared between any other users.
A hosting tip for beginners
If you are just starting to develop your website and are looking for a website hosting solution to begin with, the shared website hosting solution persists to be the smartest choice. If your web site outgrows your shared hosting account's resources, you can usually upgrade. With us, for example, this is extremely easy and does not involve migration of your data, because only the features of your website hosting account change. You can also upgrade your web hosting package to a more powerful one at any given moment without worrying about the time left before expiration. Furthermore, if you finally reach the most advanced shared website hosting plan and still need more resources (which is a good thing sometimes - it suggests that your web site's popularity has expanded!), there always is the possibility to move to a virtual private web server or a dedicated web server hosting platform without needing to switch web hosting providers.
| Business | Corporate | Enterprise | Starter |
| Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage |
| Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth |
| 5 websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | 1 website hosted |
| 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial |
| $3.92 / month | $7.83 / month | $10.83 / month | $3.00 / month |