What is Web Hosting?

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

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your web site on your own personal PC at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to discover a more dependable website hosting solution than that. If you want to establish a real website, however, which will be visible to lots of persons and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a stable web hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a hosting server for your site?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your browser, however, is not the best and easiest method to access a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your website. Thus, to create your website, you require your own personal domain and a server to host your web site on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to manage a web hosting server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your site on it. This will enable you to exercise full authority over the server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The weak side, however, is that you will need to ensure the availability of your website and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which typically costs more if bought for a whole web server.

Using a hosting packages provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to open an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The web hosting servers are physically located in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee uninterrupted Internet access.

Varieties of hosting services

The web is an immense ocean and there are lots of hosting firms providing various hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The hosting services range from free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what type of web hosting answers your needs?

If you possess a small or mid-sized website that has a few hundred viewers tops, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that numerous hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the same hosting server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts commonly involve CPU, memory, bandwidth and disk drive space quotas to make sure that the web sites accommodated on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allotted.

In case your web site is larger, you should select 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-level access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are allocated to each single private virtual web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from yours that use the resources of the physical machine, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it's of no concern. Should the resources of the Virtual Private Server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to migrate to a dedicated server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is used exclusively by you for your own personal web site needs. No one else shares its system resources and you are given full root privileges, can select the hardware in advance, add updates at a later time and add RAM or hard 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 server you can update the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your hosting supplier

If you know what your site is going to contain, or if you have just a loose idea that has not fully evolved yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to choose a hosting vendor. The most intelligent step to take is to discover a web hosting accounts provider that delivers a broad assortment of hosting solutions so that you do not have to change web hosting service providers in case you first use a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual web server solution or a dedicated server solution. We, for instance, supply cut-price shared website hosting packages, low-cost OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated hosting server plans. We also offer cost-free gifts - the shared website hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced virtual web hosting server packages and dedicated hosting plans include a free-of-charge domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24-7-365 customer service and you have all you would typically need. You could, without a doubt, discover other hosting vendors depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by checking different web hosting reviews. The most relevant option, though, is a hosting services provider that is also a domain registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in the States, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a plethora of domain extensions for registration.