What Exactly is Hosting?

If you would like to build a website and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. This service is called is hosting.

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more stable hosting service than that. If you would like to develop a real website, however, which will be reachable by numerous viewers and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a stable server where you will host it.

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

When you own a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your web browser, however, is not the best and most suitable way to access a web site. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you are in need of one for your site. Hence, to launch your site, you require your own domain and a hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an IT expert and understand how to cope with a web server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to exert complete authority over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weak side, however, is that you will have to ensure the uptime of your site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend money on the license, which usually costs more if bought for an entire physical server.

Using a web host

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the most relevant step to take is to open an account with a web hosting supplier. These are companies that offer customers powerful servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web servers are kept in data centers with special cooling and backup power supply systems to ensure constant network connectivity.

Varieties of web hosting services

The Internet is a bottomless ocean and there are a myriad of web hosting companies delivering different hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to high-priced dedicated server hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what type of hosting fulfills your needs?

If you own a small or mid-size web site that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that numerous customers and sites are hosted on one and the same server, thus curtailing the price of the service. Shared accounts usually have central processing unit, memory, bandwidth and hard disk space usage quotas to ensure that the sites accommodated on the web server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allocated.

If your site is more resource-requiring, you should opt for 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 gives you full root-level access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared server. The VPSs also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are allocated to each single virtual web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other VPSs aside from yours that share the resources of the physical machine, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to migrate to a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you lease, which is utilized exclusively by you for your own web site needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you are granted root access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades later on and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Choose your hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your site is going to include, or if you have only a vague idea that has not fully evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your web site should be to find a hosting supplier. The best solution is to find a hosting vendor that delivers an immense variety of hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap service providers in case you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to switch to a private virtual server hosting solution or a dedicated web server hosting solution. We, for example, supply low-priced shared hosting packages, low-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server plans. We also offer cost-free gifts - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual server web hosting packages and dedicated web hosting plans come with a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the excellent 24/7/365 tech support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, doubtlessly, find other web hosting companies depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by examining additional online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, however, is a web hosting packages provider that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the US, in England and in Australia, and offer many domain name extensions for registration.