Huang Shan Today

The principle behind cheap web hosting is the concept of renting space as opposed to owning space. Very much like renting an apartment as opposed to buying a house. Renting is cheaper but is a continuous cost. However, comparing this with the capital outlay of buying a house, renting may prove cheaper, especially at the start when income is low. The subscriber can choose to have the apartment all to himself as in a Dedicated Server. He may, instead, rent a room for himself in an apartment with a few flat mates, as in semi-dedicated servers. The final option is renting in a bed and closet space in a dorm or motel full of people, like a Cheap VPS. Each subsequent loss of space in the room rent analogy corresponds to tradeoffs with hardware allocation in the real sense. However, they also correspond to lower subscriber costs. Tradeoffs to lower costs are usually with allocated communications bandwidth. This determines the number of clients simultaneously connected and the speed of which they can communicate. However, in some areas, like storage space, some options actually improve with respect to cost.

Also, owning a house usually means you do all your maintenance yourself such as repairing leaky faucets, unclogging drains and the like. In a rented apartment or room, these are done by the landlord. Similarly, in renting server space, basic hardware and software maintenance is left to the provider, especially for local UK Hostings. These are just simple analogies, of course. The technical descriptions of the options are no doubt quite daunting. However, it is hope that the reader has grasped the basic concepts of affordable and cheap web hosting.