Explanation of Web Hosting

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

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to look for a more advanced hosting solution than that. If you desire to establish an actual website, however, which will be reachable by numerous viewers and you would like to make it reliable, you will also require a dependable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your website?

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and simplest means to visit a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you are in need of one for your website. So, to establish your web site, you require your own domain name and a hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT specialist and know how to tackle a web server, you can have a server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exercise complete control over the machine, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The disadvantage, though, is that you will have to guarantee the visibility of your website and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is usually more expensive if purchased for an entire web server.

Using a web hosting services provider

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance duties, the smartest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The web hosting servers are situated in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant website availability.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is an endless sea and there are plenty of web hosting vendors delivering various hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated hosting services that can drain your finances. So, what hosting type conforms to your requirements?

If you possess a small or medium-size web site that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that plenty of web hosting accounts and sites are accommodated on the same server, thus curtailing the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts commonly involve CPU, RAM memory, traffic and web server disk drive storage space quotas to guarantee that the web sites accommodated on the web server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allocated.

In case your site is larger, you should consider 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 offers full root access, which enables you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are allotted to each single VPS server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside your own that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual hosting server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to migrate to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated hosting is a server that you lease, which is utilized solely by you for your very own personal website needs. No one else shares its resources and you are given full root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply upgrades later on and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can update the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.

Pick your web hosting provider

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to include, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your website should be to pick a hosting vendor. The smartest step to take is to discover a web hosting distributor that offers a wide selection of website hosting services so that you do not have to switch service providers if you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to switch to a virtual private hosting server solution or a dedicated hosting server solution. We, for example, furnish cheap shared website hosting packages, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based Virtual Private Server web hosting packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting servers. We also offer cost-free gifts - the shared hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server packages and dedicated hosting web server packages offer a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the top-notch 24/7/365 support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, doubtlessly, find other hosting providers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different online web hosting reviews. The most suitable option, though, is a web hosting accounts provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in America, in England and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain name extensions for registration.