Web Hosting Unveiled

If you would like to create a web site and make it available for the whole world to see, it must be located on a web server. This service is called 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 friend of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to seek a more dependable website hosting solution than that. If you desire to establish a real web site, though, which will be reachable by plenty of viewers and you would like to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable hosting server on which you will host it.

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

When you own a website, 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 physical server in your web browser, however, is not the best and simplest means to open a website. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you are in need of one for your web site. Thus, to establish your web site, you require a domain of your own and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology professional and understand how to manage a server, you can have a server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exert complete authority over the web hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The weak side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the accessibility of your site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is normally more high-priced if bought for an entire physical server.

Using a web hosting provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the best step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The servers are located in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee constant network connectivity.

Types of hosting services

The Internet is an endless sea and there are a multitude of corporations delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to costly dedicated server hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of web hosting corresponds to your demands?

If you possess a small or medium-sized web page that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that many shared web hosting user accounts and web sites are accommodated on the same hosting server, thus curtailing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts usually involve CPU, RAM memory, web traffic and web hosting server storage space usage quotas to guarantee that the sites accommodated on the server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allotted.

If your site is more resource-requiring, you should select a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers full root access, which enables you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are allotted to each individual private virtual web server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that share the system resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in most instances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual web hosting server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to get a dedicated web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you lease, which is used solely by you for your own personal website needs. No one else uses its resources and you have root-level access, can choose the hardware in advance, apply updates later on and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Pick your web hosting distributor

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to be composed of, or if you have only a vague plan that has not fully evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a web hosting solutions provider. The best step to take is to discover a web hosting plans provider that distributes an immense assortment of web hosting services so that you do not need to swap web hosts in case you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to upgrade to a virtual private hosting server solution or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for example, distribute modestly priced shared web hosting packages, inexpensive OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web server packages. We also offer cost-free extras - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS hosting packages and dedicated hosting web servers come with a free domain reseller account and billing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the exceptional 24-7 tech support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, by all means, find other web hosting companies depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by examining different online web hosting reviews. The smartest option, however, is a web hosting services provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both prerequisites met by us. We have web servers in the United States of America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.