Description of Web Hosting

If you desire to launch a website and render it available for the whole world to see, it must be located on a server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own personal PC at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more dependable website hosting service than that. If you want to set up a real website, though, which will be visible to multiple visitors and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a dependable web server where you will host it.

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

When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most suitable means to reach a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your site. Hence, to launch your site, you need your own personal domain and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT pro and know how to work with a web hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to exercise full authority over the web server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The downside, however, is that you will have to ensure the availability of your site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend money on the license, which typically costs more if bought for an entire web hosting server.

Using a web host

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the most reasonable step to take is to open an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The hosting servers are placed in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee constant Internet access.

Kinds of web hosting services

The Internet is a deep sea and there are many web hosting firms providing various hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The hosting services range from free web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated web hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what hosting type answers your demands?

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

If your web site is more popular, you should consider 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 gives you full root access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are assigned to each single private virtual web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that make use of the system resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the VPS, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to obtain a dedicated server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is used just by you for your own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you acquire full root-level access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades later on and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Select your hosting solutions provider

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to comprise, or if you have only a loose idea that has not completely evolved yet, your very first move towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a web hosting accounts provider. The smartest step to take is to discover a provider that offers a large variety of hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap web hosting service providers in case you first use a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual private web hosting server solution or a dedicated server hosting solution. We, for example, offer low-cost shared website hosting plans, discounted OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server hosting packages. We also offer charge-free bonuses - the shared hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced VPS packages and dedicated hosting packages offer a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great 24x7 tech support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, doubtlessly, discover other hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by reading additional web hosting reviews online. The smartest choice, though, is a hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have hosting servers in the United States, in Britain and in Australia, and offer loads of domain name extensions for registration.