What is Hosting?

If you would like to launch a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a hosting server. The name of this service is hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a comrade of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more reliable website hosting solution than that. If you would like to launch an actual web site, though, which will be visible to multiple visitors and you desire to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your website?

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your web browser, however, is not the best and most suitable method to access a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your web site. So, to create your site, you require your own personal domain name and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an IT expert and understand how to work with a server, you can have a server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have full authority over the physical server, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The negative side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the visibility of your website and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is typically more costly if purchased for a whole machine.

Using a web hosting supplier

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the best thing to do is open an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a given tax. The servers are kept in data center facilities with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to ensure constant Internet access.

Kinds of web hosting services

The web is a broad sea and there are multiple web hosting service providers offering various hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated web hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of hosting fulfills your requirements?

If you run a small or medium-size site that has several hundred guests tops, you could safely resort to a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that multiple user accounts and web sites are hosted on one and the same web hosting server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts commonly include central processing unit, memory, bandwidth and hosting server disk storage space quotas to make certain that the web sites accommodated on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allocated.

If your web site is larger, you should choose 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 root privileges, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting web server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allocated to each individual VPS, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other VPSs apart from your own that utilize the resources of the physical server, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual private web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to switch to a dedicated server.

The dedicated servers is a physical server that you rent, which is utilized just by you for your own website needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you acquire root access, can select the hardware in advance, add upgrades 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 web server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Select your web hosting accounts provider

If you have a vision of what your website is going to include, or if you have just a loose idea that has not completely matured yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to find a hosting accounts provider. The best course of action is to discover a hosting distributor that offers a big assortment of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to change service providers in case you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to migrate to a virtual server or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for example, deliver budget-priced shared hosting packages, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server web hosting plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated hosting server packages. We also offer charge-free gifts - the shared hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced Virtual Private Server web hosting packages and dedicated hosting server plans include a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and billing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the exceptional 24/7 tech support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, undoubtedly, find other hosting companies depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading additional hosting reviews. The wisest choice, however, is a hosting plans provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain extensions for registration.