Hosting —is the kind of the service in granting of disk space for physical placing of the information on a server, constantly being in a network (usually the Internet).

Usually by the concept of service of a hosting is meant at least the service of placing of files of a site on a server on which the program is started, necessary for processing of inquiries to these files (web server)

One of the important criteria of division of a hosting is division on the Operating system established on it as on it depends programming maintenance which will support functionality of these or those services.

The prominent aspect of the description of a hosting is presence of these or those services and possibilities:

* CGI support

* Perl, PHP, ASP support

* .htaccess (for Apache)support

* databases support

And also installed modules for each of possibilities.

Hosting as the service is compared and described by quantitative restrictions:
* the size of disk space

* quantity of the monthly traffic

* quantity of sites which can be placed within the limits of a hosting as one service

* quantity of databases and quantity of a place under databases

By qualitative restrictions:

* CPU free resources, of operative memory, which influence the speed of the server

* throughput ability of channels which influences the information loading
On conditions of granting, the hosting is often divided on paid and free. Usually the company giving free hosting, earns by advertising display on the pages placed on it. Private persons for their homepages usually use free hosting, and the commercial organizations —almost always use paid hosting. Public organizations can use both paid, and a free hosting.

The free hosting, as a rule, is slower than the paid, renders only base services and is sometimes unreliable (that it is can be closed). The commercial organizations in most cases use paid hosting.

Also it is possible to divide services of a hosting according to the given resource:

* the virtual hosting — a place on a disk and-or the external traffic is given, the environment of execution of web services is uniform for many users.

* the virtual allocated server (VPS or VDS) — a place on a disk is given, the external traffic, a part of the general memory, processor time of the server. It looks for the user the same as the allocated server, but physically on one real server settles down some virtual servers. Service is intended for projects of average weight (demanding thin adjustment of environment) and beginning resellers.

* the allocated server —the whole server with certain disk space, memory, processors and the external traffic is given. It is used for “heavy” web projects which cannot co-exist on one server with other projects and all resources of a server demand under themselves.

Before you purchase any web hosting, you need to go through the web hosting reviews routine. Of course you need to be realistic and be aware of the fact that now unlimited hosting is real. But if you go through the nice number of cpanel web hosting sites - you will see the true picture.