Explanation of Web Hosting

If you want to set up a web site and render it accessible to the whole world, it has to be located on a server. This service is known as is web hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your web site on your own PC at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a pal of yours, etc. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more advanced website hosting service than that. If you would like to launch an actual web site, though, which will be reachable by plenty of individuals and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your site?

When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and quickest method to pay a visit to a website. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you are in need of one for your web site. Thus, to launch your website, you require your own personal domain and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and know how to take care of a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exert full authority over the hosting server, to make server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, though, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your website and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend money on the license, which is usually more costly if bought for an entire physical machine.

Using a hosting vendor

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the wisest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given tax. The web servers are stored in data center facilities with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to ensure constant network connectivity.

Kinds of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a broad sea and there are numerous web hosts offering various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web pages, to costly dedicated hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what hosting type suits your needs?

If you possess a small or mid-sized site that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that many accounts and web sites are accommodated on one and the very same server, thus decreasing the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts normally have CPU, memory, web traffic and server disk drive space usage quotas to make sure that the web sites accommodated on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are allotted.

In case your website is busier, 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 is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are allotted to each individual virtual web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that use the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to migrate to a dedicated server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is utilized solely by you for your own website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you acquire full server root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, add upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disk 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 update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Find your hosting accounts provider

If you know what your website is going to consist of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a hosting solutions provider. The best step to take is to find a hosting vendor that provides a wide variety of website hosting services so that you do not have to swap providers in case you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to move to a VPS server hosting solution or a dedicated web server. We, for instance, distribute cheap shared website hosting packages, moderately priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated web server hosting plans. We also offer free bonuses - the shared hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual web server hosting packages and dedicated hosting web server plans offer a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24/7 customer support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, of course, find other hosting corporations depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by checking different web hosting reviews. The wisest choice, though, is a web hosting solutions provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have web servers in the United States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer lots of domain name extensions for registration.