How Web Hosting Services Operates

If you desire to build a site and render it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your web site at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more reliable hosting service than that. If you would like to launch a real web site, however, which will be visible to numerous visitors and you want to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your site?

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the IP of the physical machine in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most appropriate means to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you need one for your web site. Thus, to establish your website, you need your own domain and a web server to host your site on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT specialist and know how to take care of a server, you can have a web hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will permit you to have full authority over the hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The weakness, however, is that you will need to ensure the visibility of your website and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for an entire hosting server.

Using a web hosting accounts provider

If you don't want to handle server maintenance duties, the best step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The hosting servers are held in data center facilities with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure continuous service uptime.

Varieties of web hosting services

The Internet is an immense ocean and there are many firms offering different hosting services to the myriad of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what type of web hosting answers your needs?

If you possess a small or medium-sized web page that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting means that many web hosting accounts and websites are hosted on one and the very same server, thus reducing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts normally have CPU, memory, bandwidth and hosting server hard drive storage space quotas to ensure that the sites accommodated on the server do not intervene with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your website is more frequently visited, you should choose a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are allotted to each individual virtual web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to get a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a server that you rent, which is used just by you for your very own personal web site needs. No one else uses its resources and you receive complete root-level access, can choose the hardware in advance, add updates at a later time and install RAM or disk 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 modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.

Choose your hosting solutions provider

If you have an idea of what your website is going to comprise, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your first move towards the creation of your website should be to choose a web hosting vendor. The most intelligent step to take is to find a hosting company that provides a broad range of hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch web hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to shift to a virtual private web server or a dedicated hosting web server. We, for example, supply moderately priced shared website hosting plans, budget-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated server hosting packages. We also offer free presents - the shared hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS web server hosting plans and dedicated hosting packages offer a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and billing software in case you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the excellent 24-7-365 tech support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, by all means, discover other hosting providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by examining additional online hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, however, is a hosting vendor that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have servers in North America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer multiple domain extensions for registration.