Tony Alves – Starting a Home Business

Virtual web hosting refers to the process of running multiple “virtual” web servers on a single physical host computer. Using this technique, a single computer can host thousands of independent web sites. Commercial web hosting service providers often use this technique to allow better manageability, efficiency and scalability of their service infrastructure.

Most people have websites that are not very demanding. In such a case, it would be wasteful to rent an entireserver (also known as dedicated hosting). It would make more sense to share a server with others (who also have low requirements). Virtual Web Hosting can also be referred to as Shared Web Hosting. This type of Web Hosting can be “Name-based” or “IP-based”. Name-based virtual Hosting, also called Shared IP Hosting, means that the Server only has one IP address. IP-based Virtual Hosting, also called Dedicated IP Hosting, means that each site the Server hosts, has a different “virtual” dedicated IP address.

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Even though both are shared/virtual Hosting services, when a Web Site requires it’s own “SSL” certificate it needs to be hosted in an IP-based Web Server. A site hosted in a Name-based server can only share an SSL certificate with all the other sites, it can’t have it’s own certificate.

Most hosting customers would rather have complete control of their server environments. They don’t want their Web Site hosted on a server with tens or hundreds of other users, who could easily use up all the resources or cause the server environment to be unstable. For these customers a Virtual Private Server (VPS) also called Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) alternative is a very attractive hosting solution. This option is a step up from a Virtual or Shared Server, but quite less expensive than a dedicated Server.

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With the resources setup in such a way that each person can only use what is allocated to them, your site will be more consistent because it will always have the same amount of access to the CPU, memory, and bandwidth. Virtual Private Servers are also more secure since even though you share the memory and CPU time, you are allocated your own file system. If a website on the server gets hacked, the hackers will only have access to that particular file system and would not harm the other websites. A VPS is also much cheaper than a dedicated server.

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If your web site has outgrown its shared hosting solution, it may be time to move it to virtual hosting, which is often seen as a low cost alternative to getting your own dedicated server. A virtual Private server (VPS) gives you most of the advantages of a dedicated server at a fraction of the price. Web Hosting Providers take advantage of the fact that few small to mid-size web sites need the full resources of a machine and host several web sites on the same server.

Typically, virtual hosting provides a customer with domain name registration assistance, multiple domain names that map to the registered domain name, an allocation of file storage and directory setup for the Web site files (HTML and graphic image files), e-mail addresses, and Web site creation services. The virtual hosting user (the Web site owner) needs only to have a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program for exchanging files with the virtual host.

Tony Alves
contact@tony-alves.com
www.topwebhosting4less.com