: Basic Questions about what WebHosting companies usually provide I have some very basic questions on web hosting. I am wondering, do web hosting companies usually allow me to run customized programs?

@Annie201

It depends on the type of web hosting you are paying for. If you are on a shared hosting plan (a lot cheaper) you can't do all of the stuff you mentioned above. But if you are on a dedicated server (higher price) you usually can do all of this stuff. The CPU/memory limits depend on the hardware of your dedicated server or the amount of resources they give you if your dedicated server is a virtual machine.

Oh and CRON jobs are allowed on both. It's not like running programs continuously but it could be enough in some cases.

Dedicated servers can cost around 1200$/year and the cheapest shared hosting I've seen cost 45$/year. If you just want to get the full control on the server and doesn't want more resources, it's a privilege that will cost you a lot. In this case, you could also consider hosting your website on a shared hosting and run the back end scripts on you own webserver made from an old computer and hosted at home (if your scripts allow this kind of configuration). I've done that for one of my websites that required a chat server and it works pretty well.

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