What is the difference between a server and hosting?

Well, formally the term "hosting" is defined as "a service that runs servers connected to the Internet, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content or host services connected to the Internet". It is applied to all hosting services: from shared to dedicated servers.

In the informal communication environment, the meaning of "hosting" has become almost synonymous with the shared hosting. In this article, we will cover it from an informal point of view. To do this, let's find out the essence of those services in order to have a clear understanding of the capabilities of your own resource.

It is known that absolutely all data on the Internet is stored on servers. Each server is a specially configured, powerful physical computer connected to the network 24/7. It can be fully managed by the user as a dedicated server (required for large organizations), or it can contain a certain number of virtual servers. This virtualization technology allows several virtual limited servers to run on one physical server. Each of the virtual servers is assigned a unique IP address. System files on such servers are completely isolated. This provides security at a sufficiently high level and protects against unauthorized access to user resources.

Virtual private servers are ideal for high-load resources and show stable performance, even if there is a technical failure on one of the neighboring virtual servers. You can configure the server by yourself, open and close ports, set a privacy policy, and more.

Complex managed hosting, such as hybrid (a combination of physical and virtual) can be applied to both dedicated and virtual servers, where the complexity of infrastructure deployment plays a key role.

Colocation provides just the Internet connection, constant power and climate control, and system administration is carried out by users.

Regarding the hosting, it is the service of providing disk space for hosting websites. All configurations are set up. Site management is implemented intuitive through the control panel’s user account. On the one hand, hosting is easy and simple to manage, and on the other hand, all resources are shared with “neighbors”, disk space and bandwidth are limited.

Although technical skills are required to set up a virtual server, this issue can be covered by any control panel that is convenient for you, which will set up your server for hosting.

In other words, hosting is a server with shared resources, configured to host and operate websites (with services already installed, such as control panel, mailbox, FTP, etc.). A virtual server, on the other hand, has dedicated resources and can be configured for any task (read more in our blog article How to choose a VPS?).

Virtual servers from LLHOST INC. have a lot of advantages:

• Affordable price in the VPS market.
• Guaranteed allocated resources with no additional fees.
• Full access to all server resources.
• Set up flexibility: the ability to install any OP and software.
• Dedicated IP address.
• Projects of other users do not affect the performance of your server.
• Ability to link the required number of domains.
• The security of your server does not depend on "neighbors".

Put your commercial project in the best environment! Choose Virtual Server (OVS) from LLHOST INC. and get a -13% discount for 3 months with a monthly billing period. For this, enter the promo code #sharedvsdedic in a special field when ordering any OVS plan from LLHOST INC. till September 23, 2022.