Shared Hosting Uncovered

If you wish to create a site and make it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web server. The name of this service is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, and so on. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more powerful hosting solution than that. If you wish to set up an actual web site, though, which will be reachable by multiple visitors and you desire to make it dependable, you will also require a dependable server where you will host it.

Why do you need a hosting server for your site?

When you have 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 physical server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and quickest method to open a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you are in need of one for your website. Hence, to set up your web site, you require your own domain name and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and know how to administer a server, you can have a server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to have complete control over the physical machine, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The weak side, however, is that you will have to ensure the availability of your web site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are availing of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to pay for the license, which is usually more expensive if purchased for a whole machine.

Using a web hosting accounts provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the wisest step to take is to register an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The web hosting servers are held in data centers with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure continuous network connectivity.

Varieties of web hosting services

The Internet is an immense sea and there are a lot of web hosting corporations providing different hosting services to the plethora of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from cost-free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what type of hosting meets your needs?

If you have a small or mid-sized web site that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting signifies that a lot of shared web hosting users and web sites are hosted on the very same server, thus lowering the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts typically involve CPU, memory, web traffic and hosting server disk space quotas to make certain that the sites accommodated on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allocated.

In case your site is more popular, you should pick a virtual private servers hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are allotted to each individual virtual hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that utilize the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it is not a problem. Should the resources of the VPS web hosting server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to move to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a server that you hire, which is utilized solely by you for your very own personal website needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you are bestowed with full server root privileges, can select the hardware in advance, implement updates later on and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Select your web host

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting supplier. The wisest step to take is to find a hosting corporation that distributes a vast variety of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap service providers if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to switch to a VPS hosting server or a dedicated web server hosting solution. We, for example, provide inexpensive shared website hosting plans, discounted OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated hosting web server packages. We also offer free bounties - the shared web hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual server web hosting packages and dedicated web server hosting packages offer a charge-free domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the superb 24x7x365 support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, certainly, find other hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by reading different hosting reviews online. The wisest choice, though, is a web hosting accounts provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States of America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain extensions for registration.