Web Hosting Explanation

If you wish to build a web site and make it accessible to the whole world, it has to be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more advanced web hosting solution than that. If you want to create an actual web site, however, which will be visible to numerous viewers and you desire to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your web site?

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the IP address of the server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most convenient way to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your site. So, to establish your web site, you require your own personal domain name and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT pro and know how to handle a web server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to have full control over the physical machine, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center personnel. The downside, however, is that you will need to guarantee the visibility of your website and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which is typically more expensive if purchased for a whole web server.

Using a web hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to handle server maintenance procedures, the most intelligent step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The servers are located in data centers with special cooling and backup power supply systems to ensure constant website accessibility.

Kinds of hosting services

The web is an immense ocean and there are many firms offering different hosting services to the plethora of website owners out there. The hosting services range from cost-free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to high-priced dedicated web hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what hosting type conforms to your demands?

If you own a small or average-size site that has several hundred guests max, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that plenty of web hosting accounts and sites are hosted on one and the same web server, thus reducing the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts ordinarily involve central processing unit, RAM, bandwidth and web content space usage quotas to guarantee that the web sites accommodated on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are allotted.

If your web site is more resource-swallowing, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are allocated to each individual virtual private web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the 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 server that you rent, which is used solely by you for your own personal web site needs. No one else shares its resources and you are granted root access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, implement updates 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 virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Select your web hosting vendor

If you have a vision of what your website is going to be composed of, or if you have only a vague idea that has not completely matured yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to find a web hosting vendor. The best step to take is to discover a hosting plans provider that delivers a vast variety of website hosting services so that you do not have to swap web hosts if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a private virtual web hosting server or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, supply modestly priced shared website hosting packages, cheap OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual hosting server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web hosting server plans. We also offer free-of-cost gifts - the shared web hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS web servers and dedicated web hosting server plans include a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the exceptional 24x7x365 technical support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, certainly, find other web hosting companies depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by checking additional online web hosting reviews. The smartest choice, though, is a hosting vendor that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in the USA, in Britain and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain name extensions for registration.