What is Hosting?

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

Host your web 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 an acquaintance of yours, etc. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more dependable website hosting service than that. If you would like to set up an actual web site, however, which will be reachable by many persons and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a dependable web server where you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your site?

When you have a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the IP of the physical machine in your browser, however, is not the best and easiest means to access a web site. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. So, to create your site, you need your own personal domain name and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology pro and understand how to deal with a web server, you can have a server of your own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to have full authority over the web server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The disadvantage, though, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are availing of a licensed OS, you will also need to spend money on the license, which is typically more high-priced if purchased for an entire web server.

Using a web hosting accounts provider

If you don't want to handle server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to open an account with a web hosting provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The servers are located in datacenters with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant website accessibility.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is an endless ocean and there are lots of hosting distributors providing different hosting services to the multitude of web site possessors out there. The hosting services vary from free web hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what web hosting type conforms to your requirements?

If you have a small or average-sized website that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that lots of clients and web sites are accommodated on one and the very same server, thus slashing the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts ordinarily include central processing unit, RAM, traffic and web hosting space quotas to make sure that the websites hosted on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your site is more resource-swallowing, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared web hosting server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are allotted to each single VPS server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other VPSs aside from yours that avail of the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to order a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you hire, which is used only by you for your own website needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you are bestowed with root access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, implement upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the VPSs 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 modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Find your web hosting packages provider

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to be composed of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your website should be to pick a hosting accounts provider. The smartest step to take is to discover a hosting provider that provides a large assortment of hosting services so that you do not have to switch web hosts in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to switch to a VPS server web hosting solution or a dedicated hosting web server. We, for example, offer cheap shared hosting plans, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated hosting web servers. We also offer charge-free gifts - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual web servers and dedicated web server plans offer a free domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the high-quality round-the-clock tech support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, certainly, find other hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading additional online hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, though, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites met by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States of America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer many domain name extensions for registration.