The web hosting market
In the majority of areas in web hosting, there is ownership as follows:
The reason why so much reselling goes on here is because the host of renting one of these servers in a data centre is very high - costs in the hundreds of dollars each month come to mind. This is not viable, or the correct solution for someone with a web site looking for an affordable web site hosting plan!
Larger hosting companies with considerable capital tend to be the ones who own data centres along with hundreds of servers to rent out. Medium sized hosting companies then rent one or a small number of servers and sell on smaller allocations of cheap web hosting on these servers to people who actually want to host their web sites.
For example, our hosting company's web server hosts our web site along with many others. The web server has been "sliced" into allocations of web space, which are then sold to others. We call each of these web spaces a web hosting account, sold as an affordable web hosting plan - cheap web hosting for those looking to host just one, or a few web sites.
So as you can see, there is quite a long food chain in the web hosting industry.
In fact, we left out an order in this chain - resellers. To quickly introduce the idea of a reseller to you, here is the food chain of web hosting once again:
In the majority of areas in web hosting, there is ownership as follows:
- The data centres own the web servers
- Web hosts rent servers (renting the actual server itself as well as the space in the data centre, which comes with an internet connection to connect the server to the internet)
- Web hosts then re-sell parts (allocations - also known as shared hosting) of this server to others who want to have their websites hosted "on the internet"
The reason why so much reselling goes on here is because the host of renting one of these servers in a data centre is very high - costs in the hundreds of dollars each month come to mind. This is not viable, or the correct solution for someone with a web site looking for an affordable web site hosting plan!
Larger hosting companies with considerable capital tend to be the ones who own data centres along with hundreds of servers to rent out. Medium sized hosting companies then rent one or a small number of servers and sell on smaller allocations of cheap web hosting on these servers to people who actually want to host their web sites.
For example, our hosting company's web server hosts our web site along with many others. The web server has been "sliced" into allocations of web space, which are then sold to others. We call each of these web spaces a web hosting account, sold as an affordable web hosting plan - cheap web hosting for those looking to host just one, or a few web sites.
So as you can see, there is quite a long food chain in the web hosting industry.
In fact, we left out an order in this chain - resellers. To quickly introduce the idea of a reseller to you, here is the food chain of web hosting once again:
- The data centres own the servers
- Web hosts rent servers (renting the actual server itself as well as the space in the data centre, which comes with an internet connection to connect the server to the internet)
- Web hosts sell large allocations of web space on their servers called reseller web hosting accounts to small companies with little capital. People who buy these accounts become resellers of web hosting
- Resellers then sell cheap web hosting allocations of their own server allocation to people who want to have web sites hosted "on the internet", in an affordable web site hosting plan, making web hosting accessible to the big as well as the small buyer.
Not all regular web hosting accounts are sold by resellers, however. To gain a market edge, hosting companies often purchase web servers and skip over the reseller step so to lower the prices of the packages they offer.
The long food chain is a good thing - competition between data centres reduces server rental prices for web hosts who buy servers. Competition between web hosts drive down the prices of web hosting accounts for people who have a website to host on the internet.
The web hosts we review offer the two lowest levels of web hosting - suited in features and price to medium and small businesses, along with regular buyers. You will find that these web hosts offer regular web hosting packages as well as reseller hosting packages - each of variable sizes. We encourage you to read further so to make the right choice of web host for your web site.
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