Description of Website Hosting

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

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a comrade of yours, etc. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more advanced hosting solution than that. If you want to build an actual website, however, which will be reachable by numerous visitors and you would like to make it dependable, you will also need a dependable server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a web hosting server for your web site?

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

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an Information Technology pro and know how to cope with a web hosting server, you can have a web hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will allow you to exert full authority over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The weak side, though, is that you will have to ensure the uptime of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is usually more costly if bought for a whole server.

Using a web hosting provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the best thing to do is sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The hosting servers are stored in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power systems to ensure continuous Internet access.

Types of hosting services

The web is a deep ocean and there are a multitude of service providers delivering different hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The web hosting services vary from free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what web hosting type conforms to your demands?

If you own a small or medium-size website that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that numerous shared web hosting clients and websites are hosted on one and the very same server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts ordinarily have central processing unit, RAM memory, web traffic and hosting server disk drive storage space usage quotas to guarantee that the web sites accommodated on the server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allotted.

If your site is busier, 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 acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which enables you to make server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are assigned to each individual private virtual hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to get a dedicated web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you lease, which is utilized only by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you are given full server root privileges, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add updates at a later time and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting provider

If you know what your website is going to include, or if you have just a loose idea that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to pick a web hosting provider. The best thing to do is find a hosting solutions provider that offers a vast range of web hosting services so that you do not need to swap service providers if you first use a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual web server or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for example, furnish cut-price shared website hosting packages, low-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web servers, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated servers. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS server hosting packages and dedicated server hosting plans include a cost-free domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great 24x7 tech support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, doubtlessly, find other web hosts depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking additional online web hosting reviews. The wisest choice, though, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the US, in England and in Australia, and offer many domain name extensions for registration.