What In Fact is Web Hosting

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

Host your web site at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a friend of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to look for a more dependable website hosting solution than that. If you desire to develop an actual web site, however, which will be visible to multiple persons and you want to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your site?

When you own a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the physical server in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most suitable method to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your web site. So, to establish your site, you need your own domain and a web hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology pro and understand how to cope with a web server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will allow you to have full authority over the machine, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, though, is that you will need to ensure the accessibility of your site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which usually costs more if bought for a whole machine.

Using a web hosting vendor

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the most intelligent step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting distributor. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are located in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee continuous network uptime.

Varieties of web hosting services

The Internet is an endless ocean and there are a multitude of hosting suppliers offering different hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what type of web hosting meets your needs?

If you have a small or average-sized web page that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that plenty of shared hosting users and sites are accommodated on one and the very same web hosting server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts typically have central processing unit, RAM memory, traffic and web content space usage quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your web site is more frequently visited, you should opt for a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allocated to each individual virtual server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that avail of the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the private virtual server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to get a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is used just by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you obtain complete root access, can choose the hardware in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting provider

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to comprise, or if you have just a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to discover a hosting distributor. The most reasonable step to take is to find a hosting packages provider that supplies a big range of hosting services so that you do not need to switch hosts if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to switch to a VPS web hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution. We, for example, furnish reasonably priced shared website hosting plans, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server web hosting packages. We also offer free-of-charge bonuses - the shared hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced virtual server hosting packages and dedicated server web hosting packages include a cost-free domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great 24x7 customer support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, by all means, discover other web hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by reading additional online hosting reviews. The wisest choice, though, is a web hosting supplier that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in North America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer lots of domain extensions for registration.