Shared Hosting Explanation
If you want to create a web site and make it accessible to the whole world, it has to be located on a server. The name of this service is shared hosting.
Host your web site at home or somewhere else
You could host your website on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more reliable website hosting service than that. If you desire to develop an actual website, however, which will be accessible to lots of people and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable web server where you will host it.
Why do you require a web hosting server for your site?
When you own a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the IP of the physical machine in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most convenient 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 website, you require your own domain and a web hosting server to host your site on.
Hosting your website yourself
If you are an IT professional and know how to work with a server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have complete authority over the web server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The weak side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the accessibility 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 money in the license, which is typically more costly if bought for an entire server.
Using a hosting distributor
If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the most intelligent step to take is to register an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are physically located in data center facilities with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure constant Internet access.
Types of hosting services
The World Wide Web is a wide ocean and there are many web hosting companies delivering different hosting services to the myriad of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to high-priced dedicated hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what hosting type meets your requirements?
If you run a small or average-size website that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that many clients and web sites are hosted on one and the same hosting server, thus slashing the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts ordinarily have CPU, memory, web traffic and hosting server hard disk storage space usage quotas to ensure that the websites hosted on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.
If your website is more resource-consuming, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are allocated to each single private virtual web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that make use of the resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in most instances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual private hosting server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to obtain a dedicated web hosting server.
The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is utilized solely by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you acquire full server root access, can select the hardware in advance, add updates later on and add RAM or hard disk 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 hosting server you can update the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.
Choose your web hosting provider
If you know what your website is going to contain, or if you have only a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your web site should be to pick a hosting provider. The best solution is to find a web host that offers a large variety of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap hosting providers in case you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated hosting solution. We, for example, furnish affordably priced shared website hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual servers, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web hosting plans. We also offer free-of-cost bonuses - the shared website hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful VPS plans and dedicated web servers offer a charge-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-class round-the-clock customer support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, without a doubt, find other hosting providers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by examining different web hosting reviews online. The most relevant choice, however, is a web hosting solutions provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have web hosting servers in North America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain extensions for registration.