Web Hosting Explanation

If you desire to create a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a web server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more dependable hosting solution than that. If you desire to create a real web site, though, which will be accessible to lots of viewers and you desire to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable server where you will host it.

Why do you need a web hosting server for your site?

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the server in your browser, however, is not the best and most suitable method to open a web site. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your website. So, to set up your site, you need your own domain and a web hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT expert and understand how to handle a web server, you can have a server of your own and host your website on it. This will allow you to have full control over the physical server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The weakness, however, is that you will need to ensure the availability of your website and to deal with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are availing of a licensed OS, you will also have to pay for the license, which is normally more expensive if bought for a whole machine.

Using a hosting supplier

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance duties, the most relevant step to take is to register an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The servers are held in data centers with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee continuous network uptime.

Kinds of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a deep ocean and there are many web hosting companies providing various hosting services to the myriad of website possessors out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can drain your finances. So, what web hosting type conforms to your needs?

If you have a small or medium-size website that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that multiple hosting user accounts and web sites are accommodated on the same hosting server, thus decreasing the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts usually involve CPU, RAM, web traffic and hosting server hard drive storage space usage quotas to make sure that the sites hosted on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are assigned.

If your site is more resource-demanding, you should choose a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allocated to each individual virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that make use of the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in most instances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to consider a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you rent, which is used solely by you for your own website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you are granted root privileges, can select a hardware configuration in advance, apply updates later on and add RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can revise the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Choose your web hosting provider

If you have a vision of what your website is going to be composed of, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting accounts provider. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a web hosting corporation that offers an immense assortment of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to swap web hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to upgrade to a virtual private web server or a dedicated web hosting server solution. We, for example, deliver reasonably priced shared website hosting plans, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server packages. We also offer charge-free extras - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced virtual web hosting server packages and dedicated server web hosting packages come with a free domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24x7 customer support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, undoubtedly, discover other hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by checking additional hosting reviews online. The most suitable choice, however, is a web hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have servers in the States, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain extensions for registration.