What In Fact is Web Hosting

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

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your web site on your own personal personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a buddy of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more reliable website hosting solution than that. If you wish to establish a real web site, though, which will be reachable by numerous people and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your site?

When you have a 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 machine in your browser, though, is not the best and easiest means to pay a visit to a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your site. Hence, to set up your web site, you need your own domain and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an IT expert and understand how to deal with a web hosting server, you can have a server of your own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exert complete authority over the machine, to make server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center personnel. The disadvantage, however, is that you will need to ensure the visibility of your site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which usually costs more if bought for an entire web hosting server.

Using a web hosting provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the most reasonable step to take is to register an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are located in data centers with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee continuous Internet access.

Kinds of hosting services

The web is an endless sea and there are lots of web hosting service providers delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website owners out there. The hosting services range from cost-free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what web hosting type answers your requirements?

If you have a small or medium-size web site that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that numerous hosting customers and websites are accommodated on the same server, thus curtailing the price of the service. Shared accounts typically involve CPU, memory, web traffic and hosting server hard disk space usage quotas to make certain that the sites hosted on the web hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are assigned.

In case your website is more popular, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers root access, which enables you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are assigned to each individual VPS hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from yours that share the system resources of the physical machine, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual private hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to migrate to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is used just by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you receive complete server root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply updates at a later time and install RAM or hard drives. 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 web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Find your web hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your site should be to select a hosting solutions provider. The wisest step to take is to discover a hosting company that delivers a wide variety of website hosting services so that you do not have to swap hosting service providers if you first use a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to switch to a private virtual server solution or a dedicated hosting server solution. We, for instance, offer affordable shared website hosting packages, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server web hosting packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web servers. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared web hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful VPS web hosting servers and dedicated server web hosting plans include a free domain reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the top-notch 24x7x365 client support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, doubtlessly, find other hosting providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by examining additional web hosting reviews online. The most reasonable choice, however, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have servers in America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.