Hosting Explained

If you want to build a site and make it accessible to the whole world, it must be located on a web server. This service is known as is hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more powerful website hosting service than that. If you desire to launch an actual web site, however, which will be reachable by lots of visitors and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable server where you will host it.

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

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the IP address of the machine in your web browser, however, is not the best and easiest means to reach a website. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your site. So, to set up your web site, you need your own personal domain and a web server to host your web site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology specialist and know how to handle a web hosting server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will permit you to exert complete authority over the machine, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The drawback, however, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are availing of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is normally more high-priced if bought for an entire physical machine.

Using a web host

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to open an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a given tax. The hosting servers are stored in data center facilities with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to ensure uninterrupted Internet connection.

Types of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is a boundless sea and there are a plethora of service providers offering various hosting services to the plethora of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services vary from free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated web hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what type of web hosting conforms to your requirements?

If you possess a small or medium-sized web site that has several hundred guests max, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting implies that multiple hosting accounts and web sites are hosted on the same hosting server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts usually have central processing unit, memory, web traffic and hosting server hard disk space quotas to guarantee that the sites hosted on the hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allocated.

If your web site is more resource-consuming, you should consider a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root-level access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are assigned to each single VPS server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other VPSs apart from yours that avail of the system resources of the physical machine, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual private hosting server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to shift to a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated packages is a physical machine that you rent, which is used only by you for your very own web site needs. No one else uses its system resources and you acquire complete root access, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, apply updates later on and install RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can revise the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.

Choose your web hosting plans provider

If you have an idea of what your website is going to contain, or if you have just a vague idea that has not fully evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your web site should be to choose a hosting provider. The wisest step to take is to find a hosting supplier that offers a wide assortment of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch web hosts if you first avail of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual web server hosting solution or a dedicated web hosting server solution. We, for example, provide affordably priced shared website hosting packages, low-cost OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated hosting web server packages. We also offer free presents - the shared website hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual server packages and dedicated web server hosting packages include a charge-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the excellent round-the-clock support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, doubtlessly, find other hosting companies depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by reading additional hosting reviews online. The most intelligent choice, however, is a web hosting provider that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites met by us. We have web hosting servers in the States, in Britain and in Australia, and offer many domain name extensions for registration.