Web hosting is a service, that places websites (and webapplications) onto the servers and allows for them to be accessed from the internet. Organization that offers this service is called hosting provider.
Types of web hosting
- Shared web hosting. In this case, many websites are located on a single server. They share its resources and IP address, unless some of those website’s owners purchased a dedicated IP. Most importantly, they share the same settings, which sometimes results in inability to run some specialized web applications, like Node.js server or an ASP.net server.
- Virtual Dedicated Server hosting. Unlike shared hosting, purchasing a VDS guaranteed you a certain amount of resources that will be available to your website only. This is achived by splitting a physical server into dedicated virtual machines with a set amounts of resources each. Due to virtualization techniques employed, VDS’s are still not fully independent, but offer a much larger array of settings. 99% of the specialized webapplications will run just fine on VDS.
- Dedicated server hosting. The pinnacle of web hosting. In this case you gain full access to all of the server’s resources, settings etc. You can run any software you want, and set it up however you can. Dedicated servers are almost exclusively used by corporate, since their power is an overkill for mundane tasks.