What is Virtual Web Hosting?

Virtual web hosting is used for shared web hosting services. These shared web hosting services allow multiple websites to connect to the Internet through one host server. It is a cost-effective way to host a website, as the cost of server maintenance is shared. It also makes it simple for less technologically advanced people to manage their websites, since they often use applications like cPanel for control.

Virtual web hosting allows a computer with one Internet protocol, or IP, address to host multiple domains. The resources for the computer, like the processor cycle and memory, can be shared efficiently amongst all domains hosted on the virtual server. It is often used for shared web hosting, which is considerably less expensive than a dedicated web server.

Large scale companies who provide low cost web hosting to customers commonly use virtual web hosting. In fact, majority of the web hosting services available worldwide are hosted on shared servers that use virtual web hosting technology.

Some businesses also use virtual servers, especially when they have to maintain several internal and external websites for different departments. This reduces cost spent on administrative overhead, management and servers to support the business.

There are few drawbacks to using virtual web hosting. It can make it hard to access a website if the domain name system (DNS) is malfunctioning, since the IP for all the websites are the same. Websites may be skipped by search engine crawlers if they are using non-traditional port numbers due to the shared server. Hosting costs can also increase if a separate IP is created for each website.