What Does Website Hosting Mean?

If you want to create a site and make it available for the whole world to see, it must be hosted on a web hosting server. This service is known as is website hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to find a more dependable hosting service than that. If you want to create an actual website, however, which will be reachable by plenty of people and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable web server where you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your website?

When you own a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the IP address of the physical machine in your web browser, though, is not the best and most convenient means to pay a visit to a website. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your web site. Hence, to establish your website, you require a domain name of your own and a web server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT specialist and know how to administer a hosting server, you can have a web server of your own and host your website on it. This will enable you to exert full authority over the web hosting server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, however, is that you will need to ensure the availability of your web site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to spend money on the license, which is usually more high-priced if purchased for an entire physical machine.

Using a web hosting packages provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the best thing to do is register an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The hosting servers are physically located in data centers with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure uninterrupted website availability.

Kinds of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is a bottomless ocean and there are a plethora of web hosting corporations providing different hosting services to the plethora of web site possessors out there. The hosting services range from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based sites, to costly dedicated hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what type of web hosting conforms to your needs?

If you own a small or average-sized web site that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that plenty of shared hosting user accounts and web sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts ordinarily include central processing unit, RAM memory, traffic and web space usage quotas to make certain that the sites accommodated on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your website is more resource-absorbing, you should choose a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are assigned to each individual VPS server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that make use of the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in most cases it's of no concern. Should the resources of the Virtual Private Server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to order a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is utilized exclusively by you for your very own personal web site needs. No one else shares its system resources and you gain full root access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Choose your web hosting accounts provider

If you know what your website is going to include, or if you have only a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your initial move towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting plans provider. The most logical step to take is to find a web hosting supplier that offers a big array of web hosting solutions so that you do not need to change web hosting providers in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to migrate to a VPS solution or a dedicated hosting server solution. We, for example, supply low-priced shared website hosting packages, low-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based Virtual Private Servers, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting server packages. We also offer free-of-cost extras - the shared web hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Servers and dedicated server web hosting packages include a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the excellent 24-7-365 support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, without a doubt, discover other web hosting firms depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by examining different online hosting reviews. The smartest option, however, is a hosting solutions provider that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have web hosting servers in the States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer lots of domain extensions for registration.