Web Hosting Description

If you wish to set up a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is web hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to seek a more stable web hosting solution than that. If you want to build an actual web site, however, which will be accessible to many persons and you wish to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your website?

When you own a site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the physical machine in your web browser, however, is not the best and quickest means to pay a visit to a website. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your website. So, to create your web site, you need your own domain name and a web server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT professional and know how to cope with a web server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your website on it. This will allow you to have complete control over the web server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, though, is that you will need to ensure the visibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also have to invest money in the license, which is usually more expensive if purchased for a whole hosting server.

Using a web hosting vendor

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance tasks, the best thing to do is sign up for an account with a web hosting provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The hosting servers are placed in datacenters with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee continuous network uptime.

Types of web hosting services

The web is an immense ocean and there are multiple hosting companies providing various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from free web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web pages, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what web hosting type fulfills your demands?

If you run a small or average-sized website that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely make use of a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that many shared web hosting customers and websites are hosted on one and the very same server, thus slashing the price of the service. Shared accounts normally include central processing unit, memory, bandwidth and server hard disk space quotas to ensure that the sites hosted on the web hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are apportioned.

If your site is bigger, you should pick a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root access, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are allotted to each single private virtual server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside your own that use the system resources of the physical machine, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual hosting server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is clearly time to order a dedicated server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is used solely by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you obtain full root-level access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, add updates later on and install RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly 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.

Pick your web hosting solutions provider

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your website should be to pick a hosting solutions provider. The most relevant step to take is to discover a provider that provides an immense selection of website hosting services so that you do not need to swap providers in case you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual web hosting server solution or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for example, deliver affordable shared hosting plans, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer free-of-charge bonuses - the shared hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced Virtual Private Server plans and dedicated hosting servers include a free-of-charge domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the exceptional 24-7 support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, undoubtedly, find other hosting service providers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking additional hosting reviews online. The most appropriate option, however, is a hosting accounts provider that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have servers in North America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer numerous domain extensions for registration.