Explanation of Shared Web Hosting

If you wish to launch a website and render it visible to the whole world, it has to be located on a hosting server. This service is called is shared web hosting.

Host your website 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 friend of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to search for a more reliable website hosting solution than that. If you would like to develop an actual website, however, which will be reachable by many visitors and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your site?

When you own a web site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP of the server in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and quickest method to access a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. Hence, to set up your web site, you require your own personal domain and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an Information Technology pro and understand how to deal with a server, you can have a server of your very own and host your website on it. This will allow you to exercise full control over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The negative side, though, is that you will need to guarantee the visibility of your website and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which usually costs more if bought for an entire physical machine.

Using a hosting packages provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the best step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The web hosting servers are held in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to ensure continuous Internet connectivity.

Varieties of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is an immense ocean and there are a lot of providers providing different hosting services to the myriad of web site proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of hosting matches your requirements?

If you have a small or medium-sized web page that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting implies that numerous shared web hosting user accounts and sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts ordinarily include central processing unit, RAM memory, bandwidth and hosting server hard drive space usage quotas to make certain that the websites hosted on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are assigned.

If your website is bigger, you should opt for a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers web hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are allocated to each individual VPS, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that use the resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most cases it's of no concern. Should the resources of the Virtual Private Server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to move to a dedicated server.

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

Select your hosting services provider

If you have a vision of what your site is going to consist of, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your first move towards the creation of your site should be to pick a web hosting supplier. The best thing to do is discover a hosting firm that delivers a big range of web hosting solutions so that you do not need to swap web hosting service providers in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to upgrade to a virtual web hosting server or a dedicated web hosting solution. We, for instance, deliver modestly priced shared website hosting packages, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web server packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated hosting servers. We also offer free extras - the shared hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS server web hosting plans and dedicated servers come with a cost-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24-7-365 customer service and you have all you would normally require. You could, of course, find other web hosting providers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by reading additional online hosting reviews. The most appropriate option, however, is a web host that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have web servers in the States, in Britain and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.