Web Hosting Explanation

If you want to build a web site and make it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a server. This service is known as is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a pal of yours, etc. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you want to set up a real website, however, which will be reachable by many individuals and you desire to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a web hosting server for your website?

When you have a website, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the server in your web browser, though, is not the best and most suitable method to open a web site. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your site. So, to set up your web site, you require your own domain name and a hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology specialist and understand how to work with a web server, you can have a server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exercise complete authority over the server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weak side, though, is that you will need to ensure the availability of your site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which is normally more expensive if purchased for an entire machine.

Using a hosting vendor

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance tasks, the smartest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting supplier. These are firms that offer customers powerful servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The web hosting servers are held in datacenters with special cooling and UPS systems to guarantee continuous network uptime.

Kinds of web hosting services

The Internet is a bottomless ocean and there are lots of hosting firms offering various hosting services to the plethora of web site possessors out there. The hosting services range from cost-free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web sites, to high-priced dedicated web hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what web hosting type matches your needs?

If you have a small or average-size web site that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that a lot of hosting user accounts and sites are accommodated on the very same hosting server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts typically have central processing unit, memory, traffic and web server hard disk storage space quotas to make sure that the web sites accommodated on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are assigned.

If your web site is larger, you should consider a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers root privileges, which enables you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are assigned to each single private virtual web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that avail of the system resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the private virtual server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to obtain a dedicated server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is used just by you for your very own website needs. No one else shares its system resources and you gain complete root-level access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your web hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your site is going to contain, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your web site should be to select a web hosting services provider. The smartest step to take is to discover a web hosting company that supplies an extensive variety of hosting services so that you do not need to change web hosting providers in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a virtual hosting server or a dedicated hosting server solution. We, for example, supply affordable shared website hosting plans, cheap OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS server web hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated hosting web servers. We also offer free-of-cost presents - the shared hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual web hosting server plans and dedicated hosting web server plans offer a charge-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch round-the-clock client support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, certainly, discover other hosting service providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different online web hosting reviews. The most appropriate choice, however, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have servers in the United States, in Britain and in Australia, and offer lots of domain extensions for registration.