What is Web Hosting?

If you want to create a site and make it available for the whole world to see, it has to be hosted on a hosting server. This service is known as is web hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a friend of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more stable website hosting service than that. If you would like to develop a real web site, however, which will be visible to a lot of individuals and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a dependable web hosting server on which you will host it.

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

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the physical server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most suitable method to access a web site. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you are in need of one for your website. Hence, to set up your site, you need a domain name of your own and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT expert and know how to cope with a hosting server, you can have a server of your very own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exert full authority over the physical machine, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The negative side, however, is that you will have to guarantee the accessibility of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which normally costs more if bought for an entire server.

Using a hosting packages provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the most intelligent step to take is to register an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain tax. The web hosting servers are housed in data centers with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to guarantee uninterrupted network uptime.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is an immense ocean and there are numerous web hosting service providers delivering different hosting services to the myriad of web site owners out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what hosting type conforms to your requirements?

If you run a small or average-sized web site that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that numerous shared web hosting customers and websites are hosted on the very same web server, thus curtailing the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts normally involve CPU, memory, traffic and hard drive space usage quotas to make certain that the websites hosted on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are apportioned.

If your website is more popular, you should opt for a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are assigned to each individual virtual server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside your own that use the resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to order a dedicated web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you lease, which is utilized solely by you for your very own web site needs. No one else uses its resources and you get root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, add upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can update the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.

Select your hosting services provider

If you have a vision of what your website is going to consist of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your website should be to find a hosting supplier. The best thing to do is discover a web hosting solutions provider that supplies a vast range of website hosting services so that you do not have to switch web hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to upgrade to a private virtual server or a dedicated web server solution. We, for example, supply low-priced shared hosting plans, inexpensive OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated server web hosting plans. We also offer free-of-cost bounties - the shared web hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced Virtual Private Server web hosting packages and dedicated servers include a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the exceptional 24/7/365 tech support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, without a doubt, find other web hosting companies depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by checking additional online hosting reviews. The most relevant option, however, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have hosting servers in America, in England and in Australia, and offer multiple domain extensions for registration.