Definition of Web Hosting

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

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more dependable website hosting solution than that. If you want to set up a real web site, however, which will be accessible to lots of visitors and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your website?

When you have a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the machine in your browser, however, is not the best and most appropriate means to visit a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your site. So, to launch your site, you require a domain name of your own and a web server to host your website on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to take care of a hosting server, you can have a server of your very own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exert full control over the web hosting server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The downside, however, is that you will have to ensure the accessibility of your website and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for a whole server.

Using a hosting provider

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance tasks, the best thing to do is sign up for an account with a web hosting company. These are firms that offer clients powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The web hosting servers are physically located in datacenter facilities with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure continuous Internet connection.

Kinds of web hosting services

The web is a wide sea and there are a myriad of web hosting companies offering various hosting services to the plethora of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web sites, to costly dedicated web hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what hosting type matches your needs?

If you possess a small or mid-size website that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that multiple web hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on the very same web hosting server, thus lowering the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts usually include central processing unit, memory, traffic and server disk drive storage space usage quotas to guarantee that the websites hosted on the server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your website is more resource-consuming, you should pick a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which permits you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are assigned to each single virtual web server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that share the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS web hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to shift to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you lease, which is used just by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you are granted root privileges, can select the hardware in advance, add upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard 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 server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting services provider

If you know what your site is going to consist of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to choose a hosting accounts provider. The wisest step to take is to find a web hosting corporation that offers a vast selection of hosting solutions so that you do not have to switch providers in case you first use a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a virtual private web hosting server or a dedicated web hosting server solution. We, for example, provide cut-price shared hosting packages, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based Virtual Private Server web hosting plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated servers. We also offer charge-free presents - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced virtual hosting servers and dedicated hosting server plans offer a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-class 24x7x365 tech support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, certainly, discover other web hosts depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different web hosting reviews online. The most relevant option, however, is a hosting solutions provider that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have hosting servers in the United States of America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer many domain extensions for registration.