How Website Hosting Functions

If you would like to launch a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it must be located on a web server. The name of this service is website hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more powerful web hosting solution than that. If you want to develop an actual web site, though, which will be accessible to plenty of individuals and you wish to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your web site?

When you have a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the IP of the physical server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most convenient means to visit a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you are in need of one for your web site. So, to establish your website, you need your own domain and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT professional and know how to manage a web hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exert full authority over the server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The downside, however, is that you will need to ensure the visibility of your website and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which usually costs more if bought for an entire web server.

Using a web hosting plans provider

If you don't want to handle server maintenance duties, the most logical step to take is to open an account with a web hosting provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The hosting servers are stored in data center facilities with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to ensure continuous Internet connectivity.

Varieties of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is a large ocean and there are plenty of service providers providing various hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web sites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what hosting type matches your requirements?

If you own a small or medium-size website that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that lots of web hosting users and sites are accommodated on the very same web hosting server, thus reducing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts ordinarily involve central processing unit, RAM memory, web traffic and web space quotas to make sure that the web sites accommodated on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allocated.

If your website is more resource-demanding, you should select a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root-level access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are allocated to each individual private virtual web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in most circumstances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual private hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to obtain a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is utilized only by you for your very own website needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you receive full root privileges, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Select your hosting services provider

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your web site should be to choose a web hosting plans provider. The best course of action is to find a web hosting packages provider that offers an extensive variety of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap web hosts in case you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to shift to a VPS or a dedicated hosting server solution. We, for example, provide low-priced shared web hosting packages, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated hosting web server packages. We also offer free-of-charge bounties - the shared website hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server packages and dedicated hosting server plans come with a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24x7 support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, by all means, discover other hosting vendors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by examining different online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, however, is a hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have web hosting servers in the US, in the UK and in Australia, and offer multiple domain extensions for registration.