How Website Hosting Operates

If you desire to set up a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be located on a server. The name of this service is website hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your website on your own computer at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more dependable hosting service than that. If you desire to create a real website, however, which will be reachable by many visitors and you desire to make it dependable, you will also need a stable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your website?

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most convenient method to reach a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your site. So, to create your web site, you require your own personal domain name and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to take care of a hosting server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to have full control over the physical machine, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The disadvantage, however, is that you will have to ensure the availability of your site 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 bought for an entire hosting server.

Using a hosting accounts provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the best step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web servers with different hardware configurations for a given fee. The hosting servers are physically located in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to ensure uninterrupted service uptime.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is a vast ocean and there are numerous hosting distributors delivering different hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what type of web hosting fulfills your needs?

If you run a small or medium-size site that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that plenty of web hosting customers and sites are hosted on one and the same web server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts normally have central processing unit, memory, web traffic and hosting server storage space usage quotas to make sure that the web sites hosted on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allocated.

In case your website is busier, you should choose a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are assigned to each single VPS, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that share the resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to move to a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated web hosting is a server that you lease, which is used just by you for your very own web site needs. No one else uses its resources and you get full root privileges, can choose the hardware in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and install RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Find your hosting accounts provider

If you have an idea of what your site is going to be composed of, 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 pick a hosting provider. The smartest step to take is to discover a web hosting company that offers an enormous variety of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to switch web hosting service providers if you first use a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to shift to a VPS solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution. We, for instance, furnish modestly priced shared website hosting plans, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server plans, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting web server plans. We also offer cost-free gifts - the shared website hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS hosting server plans and dedicated server hosting packages include a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and billing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the first-rate 24/7/365 technical support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, undoubtedly, discover other hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by reading different web hosting reviews online. The most relevant choice, though, is a hosting vendor that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have servers in America, in England and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain name extensions for registration.