What Indeed is Web Hosting

If you want to set up a web site and make it available for the whole world to see, it must be located on a web server. The name of this service is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own personal PC at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more powerful hosting service than that. If you want to build an actual website, though, which will be reachable by plenty of persons and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your site?

When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the physical server in your web browser, though, is not the best and most appropriate means to access a website. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your site. Thus, to set up your web site, you require a domain of your own and a server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology professional and understand how to cope with a hosting server, you can have a server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exert full authority over the machine, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The negative side, though, is that you will need to guarantee the accessibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend cash on the license, which is usually more high-priced if purchased for a whole web hosting server.

Using a hosting plans provider

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance duties, the best thing to do is register an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The hosting servers are held in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant network uptime.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is a vast ocean and there are a lot of hosting service providers delivering various hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The web hosting services range from free web hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to high-priced dedicated web hosting services that can drain your funds. So, what web hosting type answers your requirements?

If you possess a small or average-size website that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that plenty of shared hosting users and websites are hosted on the same server, thus slashing the price of the service. Shared web hosting accounts usually include CPU, RAM memory, traffic and disk space usage quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the web hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are assigned.

If your web site is larger, you should consider a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root-level access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are allocated to each individual private virtual web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in most circumstances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is clearly time to shift to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a server that you hire, which is used exclusively by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you have complete server root access, can choose the hardware in advance, implement updates at a later time and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Select your web hosting supplier

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a web hosting distributor. The smartest step to take is to discover a hosting provider that provides a broad variety of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to swap service providers if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to switch to a virtual private web server solution or a dedicated web server. We, for instance, provide modestly priced shared website hosting packages, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual servers, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting plans. We also offer cost-free gifts - the shared web hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful virtual private web server hosting packages and dedicated servers come with a cost-free domain reseller account and billing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the top-notch 24/7 support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, doubtlessly, find other hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by reading different hosting reviews. The best option, though, is a hosting provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States of America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer loads of domain name extensions for registration.