What Is Web Hosting?

There have been a few questions and misconceptions about what Site5 actually does, so hopefully this post will clear it up for everyone.

Site5 is a web hosting company. To put it plainly, web hosting companies make websites available (“hosted”) on the Internet. There are many different types of web hosting: shared, dedicated, and VPS are the three most common types.

• Shared – multiple customers and websites (into the hundreds) are hosted on one server. One website/customer can crash the entire server therefore causing problems for other customers/websites located on the same server. Shared hosting is the most basic type of hosting.
• Dedicated – one customer, but potentially multiple websites, is hosted on a server. Dedicated is a more advanced type of hosting.
• VPS – multiple customers and websites per server; however, each customer has their own virtual server. This means that one customer does not interfere with the other customers if they crash the server; the customer only crashes their “virtual” server. VPS hosting is between shared hosting and dedicated hosting.

Site5 is a shared hosting provider, so our servers each contain multiple websites and customers.

The most common comment I then hear is “so Google and Microsoft would call you guys to host their websites?”  No, not even close. Companies such as Google and Microsoft invest millions of dollars and host their own websites on their own servers.  We host the small and medium-sized businesses as well as personal websites (such as tomsepper.net).

What Site5 does not do is actually design and/or program the websites we host; that is our customer’s responsibility.

Any questions?