What Does Web Hosting Represent?

If you would like to launch a website and render it accessible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a hosting server. The name of this service is web hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own PC 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 testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more advanced website hosting solution than that. If you would like to establish an actual website, however, which will be accessible to plenty of individuals and you wish to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your site?

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

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT specialist and understand 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 have complete authority over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The negative side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the visibility of your website and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend cash on the license, which is normally more costly if bought for an entire physical machine.

Using a web hosting supplier

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the most relevant step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting vendor. These are companies that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The web servers are kept in data centers with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant Internet access.

Kinds of hosting services

The web is a boundless sea and there are lots of companies offering different hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The web hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of web hosting meets your requirements?

If you own a small or average-size web page that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that a lot of users and sites are accommodated on one and the very same server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts usually include CPU, memory, web traffic and server hard disk space usage quotas to make certain that the sites hosted on the server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.

If your site is busier, you should pick 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 offers root-level access, which allows 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 and central processing unit portions are allocated to each single private virtual web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside your own that make use of the system resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the resources of the Virtual Private Server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to get a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated hosting is a server that you lease, which is utilized solely by you for your very own website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you receive full server root privileges, can select a hardware architecture in advance, implement updates later on and add RAM or 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 web server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting vendor

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a vague idea that has not fully matured yet, your initial move towards the creation of your web site should be to find a hosting vendor. The best step to take is to find a hosting vendor that distributes an immense selection of website hosting services so that you do not need to swap hosting providers in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to upgrade to a VPS solution or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, supply low-cost shared website hosting packages, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web server hosting plans. We also offer charge-free bounties - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced private virtual web hosting servers and dedicated web servers offer a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the exceptional round-the-clock tech support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, doubtlessly, discover other hosting corporations depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different hosting reviews. The most reasonable choice, though, is a hosting solutions provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have servers in the States, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer loads of domain name extensions for registration.