What Does Web Hosting Represent?

If you would like to build a site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your web site on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you desire to build an actual website, though, which will be visible to a lot of viewers and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable web server where you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your website?

When you own a site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the IP of the machine in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most suitable way to reach a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your website. So, to set up your web site, you need a domain of your own and a web hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an IT specialist and understand how to deal with a web server, you can have a server of your own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have complete authority over the web server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The negative side, however, is that you will need to guarantee the accessibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is normally more high-priced if bought for an entire physical server.

Using a web hosting packages provider

If you don't want to perform server maintenance tasks, the most relevant step to take is to open an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The hosting servers are kept in data centers with special cooling and UPS systems to guarantee uninterrupted service uptime.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is a vast sea and there are plenty of hosting companies offering different hosting services to the myriad of website proprietors out there. The hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web pages, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what type of hosting corresponds to your requirements?

If you run a small or mid-sized website that has several hundred viewers tops, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that a lot of shared web hosting clients and web sites are accommodated on one and the very same hosting server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts normally involve CPU, RAM memory, traffic and server space usage quotas to guarantee that the websites accommodated on the server do not intervene with each other and do not use more resources than they are apportioned.

In case your web site is more resource-consuming, you should choose 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 gives you root-level access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are assigned to each individual private virtual web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from yours that make use of 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 private virtual hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to order a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you lease, which is utilized solely by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you acquire complete root access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, apply upgrades later on and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Select your web hosting distributor

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a loose idea that has not completely matured yet, your first move towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a web hosting supplier. The best course of action is to find a web hosting distributor that delivers a wide selection of website hosting services so that you do not have to change web hosts if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for example, provide cut-price shared hosting plans, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPSs, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting servers. We also offer cost-free bounties - the shared website hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful private virtual web hosting server plans and dedicated web hosting plans include a free-of-charge domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the excellent 24x7x365 tech support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, undoubtedly, find other hosting vendors depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by reading additional online web hosting reviews. The best choice, however, is a hosting packages provider that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have web servers in the States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain extensions for registration.