Definition of Web Hosting

If you desire to launch a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more advanced website hosting service than that. If you want to establish a real web site, however, which will be accessible to numerous persons and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server on which you will host it.

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

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP address of the server in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and quickest method to reach a website. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your web site. Hence, to establish your web site, you need a domain of your own and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to deal with a web hosting server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to have full authority over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The disadvantage, however, is that you will have to guarantee the accessibility of your web site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is typically more high-priced if purchased for a whole web hosting server.

Using a web hosting packages provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the most relevant step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The web hosting servers are located in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee uninterrupted network connectivity.

Varieties of web hosting services

The web is a vast sea and there are numerous hosting companies delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what type of hosting meets your requirements?

If you own a small or average-sized site that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that a lot of hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on the same hosting server, thus lowering the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts usually have central processing unit, RAM memory, web traffic and hosting server disk drive storage space usage quotas to ensure that the sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your website is more popular, you should opt for a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which allows you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and CPU shares are allotted to each individual private virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that use the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual web server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to switch to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a server that you lease, which is used solely by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you are given complete server root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and install 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 hosting server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Find your web hosting distributor

If you know what your site is going to contain, or if you have only a loose idea that has not completely evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your website should be to find a web host. The smartest step to take is to find a web host that provides a vast range of hosting services so that you do not need to switch web hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to shift to a virtual hosting server solution or a dedicated server hosting solution. We, for instance, offer moderately priced shared website hosting packages, budget-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web hosting server plans. We also offer free gifts - the shared web hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced private virtual hosting server plans and dedicated web server hosting plans include a free-of-charge domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the topflight 24/7 technical support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, undoubtedly, find other hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different web hosting reviews online. The most suitable option, though, is a web host that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have web servers in North America, in England and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain name extensions for registration.