What is Web Hosting?

If you want to create a site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a web hosting server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own computer at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a pal of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you wish to build an actual website, however, which will be accessible to many persons and you wish to make it dependable, you will also need a stable hosting server on which you will host it.

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

When you own a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your browser, however, is not the best and most suitable method to pay a visit to a website. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your site. Thus, to create your website, you require a domain name of your own and a web server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT pro and understand how to administer a hosting server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exert full authority over the physical server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The downside, though, is that you will need to guarantee the accessibility of your web site and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which is typically more costly if purchased for a whole server.

Using a hosting vendor

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance tasks, the most logical step to take is to register an account with a web hosting services provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are placed in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure constant Internet access.

Types of hosting services

The web is a wide sea and there are multiple web hosting distributors offering different hosting services to the multitude of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what type of hosting suits your needs?

If you own a small or medium-size web site that has several hundred guests max, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that plenty of shared web hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the very same hosting server, thus curtailing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts normally include central processing unit, memory, bandwidth and web server hard disk space quotas to ensure that the sites hosted on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

If your website is more resource-absorbing, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are assigned to each individual virtual private web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that share the resources of the physical machine, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to get a dedicated web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is used just by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you get full root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply upgrades later on and add RAM or 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 hosting web server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your web hosting supplier

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague idea that has not completely matured yet, your very first move towards the creation of your web site should be to find a web host. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a hosting packages provider that delivers a large array of web hosting services so that you do not need to change hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a VPS solution or a dedicated web hosting server solution. We, for instance, distribute affordably priced shared hosting packages, inexpensive OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server packages. We also offer free-of-charge presents - the shared website hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful virtual server hosting packages and dedicated hosting server packages offer a cost-free domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the superb 24/7/365 customer service and you have all you would usually need. You could, doubtlessly, find other web hosting suppliers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading different web hosting reviews online. The most relevant option, however, is a web hosting solutions provider that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the States, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a plethora of domain extensions for registration.