Hosting Definition

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

Host your web site at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to discover a more stable hosting solution than that. If you desire to build a real web site, though, which will be accessible to multiple visitors and you desire to make it dependable, you will also need a stable 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 Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP address of the physical server in your browser, though, is not the best and simplest way to reach a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your web site. Therefore, to set up your site, you require your own personal domain and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and know how to administer a web server, you can have a web server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exercise full authority over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The weak side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the accessibility of your website and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is typically more high-priced if purchased for a whole machine.

Using a web hosting distributor

If you don't want to perform server maintenance tasks, the wisest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The servers are physically located in data centers with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee uninterrupted website availability.

Varieties of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a wide ocean and there are lots of companies delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The hosting services vary from free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web pages, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what web hosting type conforms to your needs?

If you possess a small or average-size website that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that numerous accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the same web hosting server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts commonly include CPU, memory, traffic and server disk storage space usage quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your website is more resource-swallowing, you should opt for a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which enables you to implement server configuration modifications - 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 allocated to each individual VPS hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other VPSs aside from your own that avail of the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to switch to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you rent, which is utilized only by you for your own personal web site needs. No one else uses its system resources and you get full root privileges, can select the hardware in advance, add upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Find your web hosting vendor

If you know what your website is going to comprise, or if you have just a loose idea that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to select a hosting accounts provider. The best thing to do is find a hosting corporation that supplies a large array of hosting services so that you do not need to swap providers if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to move to a private virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated web server. We, for instance, offer inexpensive shared website hosting packages, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based Virtual Private Server hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting servers. We also offer free extras - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual server hosting plans and dedicated server web hosting plans come with a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and billing software in case you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the great 24-7-365 support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, of course, find other hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by checking additional hosting reviews. The wisest option, though, is a web hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have web hosting servers in the States, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain name extensions for registration.