Web Hosting Sites

Web Hosting Sites are web hosting service provider sites that provide internet access for individual webmasters and businesses who want to set up websites. There are various types of web hosting services provided by web hosting sites and the web hosting companies that operate them, including shared web hosting, dedicated hosting and virtual private server, called VPS hosting. Leading and favorite web hosting sites are listed below, and include Hostgator, GoDaddy, Yahoo, Bluehost, 1and1, FatCow and iPage. Exactly which web hosting site is the best for you depends on your needs, but we have done a lot of the selection work for you by gathering our favorite and the most popular web hosting companies in our web hosting sites listings below.

In terms of size, GoDaddy is the largest of the web hosting sites, but it also is a registrar and auctioneer and does not necessarily meet all needs, and its non-standard feature set is unappealing to some webmasters, but appealing to a lot of others and to some newer web designers. As another example, Hostgator is an independent site, which is becoming increasingly popular for its good customer service and offerings of popular features like Cpanel access and a script installer like Fantastico for automated applications loading and management. Other web hosting companies like Bluehost, iPage, Hostmonster and FatCow also are independent web hosting sites providing a similar array of features.

With GoDaddy reputed to be the largest of the web hosting companies, 1and1 also is very popular in Europe. It is not known what share of the market is possessed by Yahoo, but it is believed very significant. Among our favorite web hosting companies are Hostgator and Bluehost. Because of the offerings of standardized features, these web hosting sites are preferred.

Many people wonder what the different types of hosting mean. Here are brief explanations of the different types of services provided by web hosting sites:

• Shared Hosting Sites: This is the least expensive form of hosting provided on web hosting sites. "Shared" means that your account is sharing equipment, i.e. a web server, with other customers. So one web server on a particular internet IP address may hold dozens if not hundreds of websites. Because of the sharing, shared hosting is less expensive than other alternatives, and also the most popular for web page hosting. Shared hosting becomes inadequate as a web site grows. This is because the server demands of popular websites often exceed the processing power allocated to an individual shared hosting account. So, if your website grows, great! But then you have to move it over to one of the other webhosting alternatives.
• VPS Hosting: VPS is the next step up in the service offerings of web hosting sites. Fewer accounts are on a single server, so the capacity for any one account is larger. Of course, this speedier, higher capacity service also is more expensive. But still it is not as expensive as dedicated web hosting, which is the next step up up in terms of speed, and price. "VPS" is an acronym meaning "virtual private service". With this service, to the web page hosting webmaster it appears they have a private server, but it is not, hence it is "virtual". Many consider VPS a great bridge between less expensive shared hosting and dedicated server hosting. Frequently, such as with Hostgator and some other web hosting companies, VPS plans can be customized to match your specific hosting capacity needs and optionally can be upgraded or downgraded on an as needed basis - typically as a web site grows. This scalability makes VPS hosting popular. Naturally if you scale up capacity, cost goes up too.
• Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated web hosting is what its name implies - you get a dedicated web server on which your websites are hosted. Not all web hosting sites offer dedicated hosting and you may need to shop around a bit for it. However, a number of the web hosting sites listed here at Web Hosting Sites 360 have dedicated web hosting. Not only does dedicated web hosting provide speedier and higher capacity service, but it also is the most flexible type of web hosting. This is because you don't need to share, so you pretty much can do what you want on the dedicated server. Not all dedicated servers are the same however. Some have more disk storage capacity or may have higher CPU speeds. As with VPS, the more capacity and speed you want, generally speaking, the higher the price.