Description of Web Hosting

If you would like to create a web site and make it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be hosted on a web server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your website on your own PC at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more powerful web hosting solution than that. If you want to set up a real web site, though, which will be visible to lots of persons and you desire to make it reliable, you will also require a dependable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your website?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and easiest way to open a web site. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your site. Hence, to launch your site, you need your own personal domain and a web hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT specialist and understand how to handle a web server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to exert complete control over the hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The downside, however, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is usually more high-priced if bought for an entire physical machine.

Using a web hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the most intelligent step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful web servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The web servers are housed in data center facilities with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure uninterrupted website availability.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is a boundless ocean and there are lots of web hosting suppliers providing different hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what web hosting type fits your demands?

If you own a small or average-sized website that has several hundred visitors max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that a lot of shared hosting clients and websites are hosted on one and the same web server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts commonly involve CPU, RAM memory, web traffic and web hosting server hard disk space quotas to make sure that the web sites hosted on the server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

In case your website is more frequently visited, you should select a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers full root access, which enables you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allotted to each individual virtual server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that use the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the private virtual web hosting server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to migrate to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is utilized exclusively by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you acquire complete root-level access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, add updates at a later time and install RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting packages provider

If you have a notion of what your website is going to comprise, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to discover a hosting vendor. The best solution is to find a web hosting supplier that furnishes a big array of website hosting services so that you do not have to switch web hosting service providers in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server web hosting solution or a dedicated server solution. We, for instance, provide modestly priced shared hosting plans, reasonably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web server hosting plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated hosting server packages. We also offer free-of-charge presents - the shared web hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced virtual private hosting server plans and dedicated servers come with a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the exceptional 24-7-365 support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, certainly, find other web hosting vendors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading different online web hosting reviews. The most reasonable option, though, is a hosting vendor that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have servers in the USA, in Britain and in Australia, and offer numerous domain name extensions for registration.