Hosting Definition

If you desire to create a website and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a server. This service is called is hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a buddy of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more dependable website hosting service than that. If you desire to build an actual web site, though, which will be visible to lots of persons and you desire to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your site?

When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and simplest means to visit a website. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you are in need of one for your website. Therefore, to launch your website, you need your own personal domain and a web server to host your site on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an Information Technology pro and understand how to take care of a web server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your website on it. This will permit you to have complete authority over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The drawback, though, is that you will need to guarantee the uptime of your website and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to pay for the license, which is usually more expensive if bought for an entire physical machine.

Using a hosting distributor

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the best thing to do is open an account with a web hosting vendor. These are firms that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are located in data centers with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee continuous service uptime.

Types of web hosting services

The web is a deep sea and there are plenty of hosting distributors delivering different hosting services to the myriad of web site proprietors out there. The hosting services range from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what type of hosting satisfies your requirements?

If you run a small or mid-sized website that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting signifies that numerous hosting users and sites are accommodated on the very same hosting server, thus trimming the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts typically include CPU, memory, web traffic and web storage space quotas to guarantee that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your site is more frequently visited, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allotted to each single private virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other VPSs aside from your own that utilize the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the Virtual Private Server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to switch to a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical server that you lease, which is utilized solely by you for your own website needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you obtain full root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply updates at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting services provider

If you know what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague idea that has not fully evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your web site should be to find a hosting vendor. The best step to take is to find a hosting company that offers an enormous assortment of website hosting services so that you do not need to change web hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a private virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated web server. We, for example, distribute cut-rate shared hosting packages, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web server hosting plans. We also offer charge-free bonuses - the shared hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual private web servers and dedicated hosting packages come with a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the excellent 24-7-365 tech support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, undoubtedly, find other web hosting providers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking additional online hosting reviews. The best choice, though, is a hosting packages provider that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States, in England and in Australia, and offer lots of domain name extensions for registration.