Description of Web Hosting

If you wish to set up a website and render it accessible to the whole world, 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 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 site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to discover a more advanced web hosting service than that. If you want to set up an actual web site, however, which will be accessible to many individuals and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a stable web server on which you will host it.

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

When you have a site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the IP address of the server in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most appropriate method to open a website. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you need one for your website. Hence, to create your website, you need your own personal domain name and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an IT specialist and know how to tackle a web server, you can have a web server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exercise complete authority over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The weakness, though, is that you will have to guarantee the uptime of your website and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is typically more costly if purchased for an entire machine.

Using a web hosting packages provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to sign up for an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The servers are placed in datacenters with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee continuous Internet connection.

Kinds of web hosting services

The web is an immense sea and there are a plethora of hosting corporations providing different hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to high-priced dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what web hosting type fulfills your requirements?

If you possess a small or mid-sized web site that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely use a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that numerous shared web hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on the same web server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts typically include CPU, RAM memory, bandwidth and web hosting storage space quotas to make certain that the sites hosted on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are assigned.

If your web site is busier, you should opt for a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and CPU shares are allotted to each individual virtual private hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from yours that make use of the resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in most instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to obtain a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you rent, which is used solely by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you are given complete server root access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, add upgrades later on and add RAM or hard disk 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 server you can revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Pick your hosting packages provider

If you have a notion of what your site is going to be composed of, or if you have only a loose plan that has not completely matured yet, your very first move towards the creation of your site should be to discover a web hosting solutions provider. The most intelligent step to take is to find a web hosting accounts provider that supplies an extensive assortment of hosting solutions so that you do not have 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 switch to a virtual web server or a dedicated hosting web server. We, for example, distribute low-cost shared web hosting plans, reasonably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer cost-free extras - the shared website hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced VPSs and dedicated hosting web servers come with a free domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the superb 24-7-365 support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, doubtlessly, find other web hosting suppliers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different hosting reviews online. The most appropriate option, however, is a hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have web servers in the States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain extensions for registration.