Explanation of Web Hosting

If you would like to create a website and render it visible to the whole world, it has to be located on a hosting server. The name of this service is web hosting.

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a chum of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more powerful website hosting service than that. If you want to develop a real web site, however, which will be reachable by plenty of persons and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your website?

When you own a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the IP of the server in your browser, however, is not the best and most convenient way to access a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you are in need of one for your website. Thus, to launch your site, you need your own domain name and a web server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to manage a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to exert full authority over the machine, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The downside, though, is that you will need to ensure the uptime of your site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is typically more high-priced if bought for an entire server.

Using a web hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the most relevant step to take is to register an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The hosting servers are housed in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to ensure continuous website availability.

Kinds of hosting services

The web is an immense sea and there are a myriad of web hosting suppliers providing various hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The web hosting services vary from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based sites, to costly dedicated hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what type of web hosting fulfills your needs?

If you run a small or mid-sized website that has several hundred viewers tops, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that lots of web hosting customers and sites are hosted on one and the very same hosting server, thus trimming the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts typically include CPU, memory, traffic and server disk space usage quotas to make sure that the sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are allotted.

In case your website is more resource-absorbing, you should consider a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root privileges, which allows you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are assigned to each single virtual hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that avail of the system resources of the physical machine, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to shift to a dedicated web server.

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

Pick your hosting services provider

If you have a vision of what your website is going to comprise, or if you have only a loose idea that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to find a hosting distributor. The wisest step to take is to find a provider that offers a broad range of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch hosts if you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a Virtual Private Server web hosting solution or a dedicated server hosting solution. We, for instance, supply reasonably priced shared website hosting packages, inexpensive OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server plans. We also offer charge-free extras - the shared hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced private virtual servers and dedicated server packages offer a free domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the topflight 24x7 customer support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, by all means, discover other hosting service providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by checking additional online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, however, is a hosting services provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in North America, in England and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain extensions for registration.