Definition of Web Hosting

If you desire to build a web site and render it accessible to the whole world, it has to be located on a hosting server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to discover a more reliable hosting service than that. If you desire to develop an actual website, though, which will be accessible to numerous visitors and you want to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable web server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your website?

When you own a site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most suitable way to reach a web site. That is how and why domains came into being and why you need one for your site. So, to create your site, you need your own personal domain name and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT pro and understand how to work with a hosting server, you can have a server of your own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exert full control over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The downside, however, is that you will need to guarantee the visibility of your website and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also have to invest money in the license, which typically costs more if bought for an entire hosting server.

Using a hosting vendor

If you don't want to handle server maintenance duties, the most reasonable step to take is to register an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web servers are located in data centers with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee constant website accessibility.

Types of hosting services

The web is a boundless ocean and there are lots of web hosts offering different hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what type of hosting answers your requirements?

If you own a small or mid-sized website that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting implies that multiple hosting users and sites are hosted on the same web server, thus decreasing the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts commonly include central processing unit, RAM, bandwidth and hard disk space usage quotas to make sure that the sites hosted on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

If your website is more resource-absorbing, you should pick 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 gives you full root access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are assigned to each individual VPS web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually 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 the majority of circumstances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to obtain a dedicated server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you lease, which is utilized just by you for your very own web site needs. No one else uses its system resources and you gain root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply updates later on and add RAM or hard 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 modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your hosting accounts provider

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague idea that has not completely matured yet, your initial move towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting accounts provider. The best thing to do is find a web hosting provider that provides a big array of hosting services so that you do not have to switch hosting service providers in case you first use 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 server. We, for example, supply affordable shared hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server packages. We also offer charge-free gifts - the shared hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS hosting server packages and dedicated web hosting server packages come with a cost-free domain reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the superb 24x7x365 support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, by all means, discover other web hosting providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by checking additional online hosting reviews. The most relevant choice, however, is a web hosting provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have hosting servers in America, in Britain and in Australia, and offer many domain extensions for registration.