What is web hosting?

Essentially web hosting is a rented space into which the data that make up the webpage is stored. The domain name points to a particular hosting account on a particular server.

This process is known as delegation - the servers' main job is to 'serve' files to the web browser that made the request. And in the same way as property is managed by a landlord, the server is managed by a web host.

What is shared web hosting?

Shared web hosting services traditionally started out by selling space on hosting servers so that a number of different customers could be served by the one machine. An individual server could cater for a number of different web hosting accounts, each with an allocated amount of storage and bandwidth.

Netregistry pioneered a technique of clustering a number of servers together in a hosting cloud. This allowed the infrastructure to share a wide pool of resources - storage, processing power, etc - while removing the risk of an individual server failing. Load balancers ensure requests are directed to the least busy server, resulting in higher levels of performance at any one time.

So instead of sharing a single server, hosting accounts now share the entire infrastructure. Multiple servers, system processors and storage devices operate together as one server, which is then split into thousands of smaller 'virtual' servers, each operating with the same performance and reliability as a single server. Each can be used to host a website. These services also share the same IP address and allows for many thousands of web requests to be processed at any one time.

What is virtual web hosting?

Virtual Private Server (VPS) web hosting is designed to allow one physical server to share its resources, such as memory, storage and processing power, with a number of virtual machines and to use its resources more efficiently without the high cost of maintaining such a hardware system.

VPS is the answer for customers who want to host multiple domains on a single server unrestricted by operating system types such as Linux or Windows preferences as customers will have full access to their virtual server to install custom software along with the ability to modify the server configuration, which cannot be done on a shared environment.