How Hosting Functions

If you want to set up a web site and render it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be hosted on a server. This service is known as is hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your site on your own computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more reliable website hosting service than that. If you wish to build an actual website, though, which will be visible to a lot of people and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require 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 located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical server in your web browser, however, is not the best and most convenient means to access a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your web site. Therefore, to create your website, you need your own domain name and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT professional and know how to handle a server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your site on it. This will permit you to have full control over the physical machine, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center personnel. The downside, however, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your website and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to pay for the license, which is usually more high-priced if purchased for a whole physical server.

Using a hosting accounts provider

If you don't want to perform server maintenance procedures, the most reasonable step to take is to open an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The web servers are housed in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant network uptime.

Varieties of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is an immense sea and there are a multitude of web hosting vendors delivering different hosting services to the multitude of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated web hosting services that can drain your finances. So, what type of hosting answers your needs?

If you have a small or mid-size website that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting signifies that a lot of hosting clients and web sites are hosted on the very same server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts commonly include CPU, RAM, bandwidth and server disk drive space usage quotas to guarantee that the sites accommodated on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your web site is more resource-demanding, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, which enables you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The VPSs also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allocated to each individual VPS, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other VPSs aside from yours that share the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the VPS web hosting server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to consider a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated packages is a physical machine that you lease, which is utilized exclusively by you for your own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you obtain full server root privileges, can choose the hardware in advance, add updates at a later time and install RAM or hard 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 server you can update the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.

Select your web hosting distributor

If you have an idea of what your site is going to be composed of, or if you have only a loose plan that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to discover a web hosting plans provider. The wisest step to take is to discover a hosting solutions provider that provides a large array of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to switch web hosting providers in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to migrate to a VPS hosting server solution or a dedicated web hosting server solution. We, for instance, offer reasonably priced shared website hosting packages, discounted OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting server plans. We also offer charge-free bonuses - the shared web hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS hosting servers and dedicated hosting web server packages offer a cost-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the topflight 24-7-365 customer support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, of course, discover other hosting companies depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by checking different hosting reviews online. The wisest choice, however, is a web hosting provider that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have servers in the United States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer lots of domain extensions for registration.