Definition of Web Hosting

If you desire to build a website and render it visible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a hosting server. This service is known as is web hosting.

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a buddy of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more powerful web hosting solution than that. If you desire to create a real website, however, which will be visible to multiple viewers and you want to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your site?

When you have a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the IP of the server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most convenient method to open a web site. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you are in need of one for your site. Therefore, to create your site, you need your own personal domain name and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an IT specialist and understand how to take care of a web server, you can have a web hosting server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to have full control over the physical machine, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center personnel. The downside, though, is that you will need to ensure the accessibility of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are availing of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to pay for the license, which is typically more costly if purchased for an entire physical machine.

Using a hosting distributor

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance duties, the wisest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting supplier. These are firms that offer customers powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The web servers are kept in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee continuous website accessibility.

Kinds of web hosting services

The web is a large sea and there are numerous web hosting service providers offering various hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The hosting services vary from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to high-priced dedicated hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of hosting suits your needs?

If you run a small or average-size web page that has several hundred visitors max, you could safely make use of a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that plenty of shared web hosting clients and web sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus curtailing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts usually have CPU, RAM, bandwidth and data storage space quotas to ensure that the websites hosted on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are apportioned.

If your website is more frequently visited, you should consider a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are allotted to each individual VPS hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in most instances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to consider a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated hosting is a server that you lease, which is utilized just by you for your own web site needs. No one else shares its resources and you are given full root-level access, can select the hardware in advance, implement upgrades later on and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting vendor

If you know what your site is going to include, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a web hosting vendor. The best course of action is to find a hosting distributor that distributes an enormous range of hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap service providers in case you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to switch to a VPS server solution or a dedicated hosting solution. We, for example, supply discounted shared hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web server packages. We also offer charge-free bonuses - the shared hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server hosting packages and dedicated servers offer a free domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the exceptional 24/7/365 tech support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, without a doubt, discover other hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by examining different web hosting reviews online. The wisest choice, however, is a hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have web servers in the United States, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain extensions for registration.