A web hosting provider is a company that supplies individuals and businesses with hosting services and provides hosting space and network connectivity for the websites on its servers to be online.
There are several types of web hosting, so some providers offer only one type, while others offer the full range of hosting services from shared hosting accounts to dedicated servers. In this way, they target different groups of customers, from individuals who need small plans to corporations or social networks that require powerful hosting solutions.
The first type is the shared web hosting solution. Each client gets an account with a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth, and pays only for this particular quota of the server system resources. As all resources are distributed among the accounts on the server, each client pays a very low price. Personal and small business websites are usually accommodated by shared hosting accounts. This type of hosting is further divided into free and paid. Some companies offer only free plans, others only paid, while a number of companies provide both services at the same time and allow free users to upgrade to a paid account.
While the majority of providers offer shared web hosting solutions, other companies like NTC Hosting, for example, also offer Virtual Private Servers and dedicated servers. The difference is that these plans are the most powerful web hosting packages and they come with full root access, so the user can install any software on the server. Usually there are a few VPS accounts on a physical machine, while with a dedicated server, the client gets a whole machine and is limited only by its hardware.
Hosting providers have two options regarding the maintenance and connectivity of their servers. They can either do the job themselves, or they can rent a space in a large datacenter where a trained staff will handle the servers while the hosting company's staff can concentrate on the actual hosting products. Most companies prefer the latter since it is quite expensive to build and maintain such a facility. The datacenter provides the necessary environmental conditions for the optimal work of the servers, such as humidity and air temperature, which are controlled using powerful humidification systems and heaters. They also have at least one redundant power supply that can handle keeping thousands of servers and other hardware up and running if the main power supply fails. In addition, each datacenter has several Internet providers, ensuring that all servers will be accessible at all times. Hosting companies have hardware devices that allow them to access and reboot the servers right from their office, so a single company may own servers located in datacenters all around the world.
The software on the servers may also be different from one provider to another. There are several server Operating Systems, including Windows, FreeBSD, different Linux distributions, etc. There are also various web programming languages used to create script-driven platforms and some of them are not compatible with certain Operating Systems. Websites using the ASP.NET framework, for example, cannot run under any other OS except Windows. That's why, some providers offer servers running different Operating Systems, while others have servers using one OS only. Since all hosts support PHP and HTML sites, the Operating System is not a factor for the majority of users.
Along with the different types of hosting, many companies also offer domain registrations and SSL certificates. Although these services are separate from the actual hosting service, they are tightly related, so it is always more convenient to purchase and manage everything in one place.