What is Hosting?

If you want to create a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be hosted on a web hosting server. This service is called is hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more dependable hosting solution than that. If you want to create a real web site, though, which will be accessible to a lot of individuals and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a stable hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your web site?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the server in your browser, though, is not the best and most convenient method to reach a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your website. Thus, to launch your website, you need your own personal domain name and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT expert and understand how to handle a server, you can have a web server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exert complete authority over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The negative side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the availability of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is normally more expensive if bought for an entire hosting server.

Using a hosting supplier

If you don't want to perform server maintenance duties, the best solution is to register an account with a web hosting plans provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The servers are stored in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee continuous Internet connectivity.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is a wide ocean and there are a lot of hosting providers offering different hosting services to the plethora of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to high-priced dedicated web server hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what hosting type matches your needs?

If you run a small or medium-sized web site that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that a lot of web hosting user accounts and sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus trimming the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts typically include CPU, RAM, traffic and hosting server hard drive storage space quotas to make certain that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allocated.

If your site is more frequently visited, you should choose a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, which allows you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web hosting server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are allocated to each single VPS hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other VPSs aside from yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to order a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you rent, which is used only by you for your own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you gain complete root access, can select the hardware in advance, add updates at a later time and install RAM or disk 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 server you can modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting services provider

If you have a vision of what your website is going to contain, or if you have only a loose idea that has not fully evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a hosting provider. The most logical step to take is to discover a hosting company that provides an enormous assortment of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap web hosts if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to move to a virtual web server or a dedicated web server hosting solution. We, for example, provide affordable shared web hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server hosting packages. We also offer free-of-charge gifts - the shared hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Servers and dedicated server web hosting packages include a cost-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the first-class 24/7 tech support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, certainly, find other web hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by examining different web hosting reviews. The wisest choice, though, is a web hosting services provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have servers in North America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer many domain name extensions for registration.