What is Web Hosting?

If you want to launch a website and make it available for the whole world to see, it must be located on a server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, etc. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more reliable website hosting solution than that. If you wish to develop a real website, though, which will be reachable by a lot of individuals and you want to make it reliable, you will also require a dependable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your site?

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

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT expert and know how to manage a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exert complete authority over the web hosting server, to make server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The downside, however, is that you will have to guarantee the uptime of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which is typically more expensive if purchased for an entire web hosting server.

Using a hosting vendor

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the smartest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting plans provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given tax. The servers are kept in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee continuous service uptime.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is a large ocean and there are a plethora of companies providing various hosting services to the multitude of website owners out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what web hosting type fulfills your demands?

If you possess a small or mid-sized website that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely resort to a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting means that many web hosting accounts and web sites are hosted on the very same server, thus slashing the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts commonly have CPU, memory, traffic and web server disk drive storage space quotas to guarantee that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your site is more frequently visited, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are assigned to each single private virtual hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside your own that use the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual private web hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to shift to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is used just by you for your very own web site needs. No one else shares its resources and you receive complete server root access, can choose the hardware in advance, add updates later on and install RAM or hard disks. 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 server you can revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your web hosting vendor

If you know what your site is going to comprise, or if you have just a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your site should be to select a web host. The most logical step to take is to discover a web hosting provider that distributes a broad array of hosting services so that you do not need to change web hosts in case you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual hosting server or a dedicated web server. We, for example, supply inexpensive shared website hosting plans, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated server hosting plans. We also offer charge-free gifts - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful virtual web server packages and dedicated web hosting servers offer a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24/7/365 technical support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, certainly, find other hosting firms depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different web hosting reviews online. The most relevant choice, though, is a hosting provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have web servers in North America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain extensions for registration.