How Shared Hosting Functions

If you want to build a website and render it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be located on a server. This service is known as is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a mate of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to find a more powerful website hosting service than that. If you wish to create a real website, however, which will be accessible to many individuals and you would like to make it dependable, you will also need a stable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your web site?

When you own a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the physical server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and quickest means to access a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your website. Thus, to establish your web site, you require your own domain name and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT professional and know how to manage a web server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will permit you to exert full authority over the machine, to make server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The downside, though, is that you will need to guarantee the uptime of your web site and to deal with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also have to invest money in the license, which usually costs more if purchased for a whole hosting server.

Using a hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the best thing to do is register an account with a web hosting company. These are firms that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The servers are housed in datacenters with special cooling and backup power supply systems to ensure continuous Internet access.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is an endless ocean and there are a multitude of web hosting firms offering different hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-cost web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated server hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what web hosting type fulfills your requirements?

If you have a small or medium-size site that has several hundred visitors max, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting signifies that numerous web hosting customers and websites are accommodated on the very same web hosting server, thus decreasing the price of the service. Shared accounts usually include CPU, RAM memory, bandwidth and server hard disk storage space usage quotas to make certain that the sites hosted on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are apportioned.

In case your website is more resource-requiring, you should consider a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are allotted to each single virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that make use of the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to migrate to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you lease, which is utilized only by you for your very own website needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you are granted root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, add upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. 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 web server you can revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Pick your web host

If you know what your website is going to include, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your initial move towards the creation of your site should be to find a web hosting packages provider. The most logical step to take is to discover a service provider that furnishes a broad assortment of hosting services so that you do not have to swap hosts in case you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to shift to a virtual web server or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for instance, offer low-cost shared web hosting plans, budget-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual hosting server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer charge-free presents - the shared hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced Virtual Private Server hosting packages and dedicated hosting servers include a cost-free domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the exceptional round-the-clock client support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, undoubtedly, discover other web hosting companies depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by reading additional web hosting reviews online. The best choice, however, is a web hosting vendor that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have web hosting servers in the USA, in the UK and in Australia, and offer multiple domain extensions for registration.