Shared Hosting Definition

If you would like to launch a site and make it accessible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a server. This service is known as is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your site on your own computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more dependable website hosting service than that. If you want to launch a real web site, though, which will be reachable by numerous persons and you desire to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your web site?

When you own a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your browser, however, is not the best and most suitable way to open a website. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your web site. Therefore, to establish your site, you need a domain of your own and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an Information Technology specialist and understand how to handle a hosting server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will permit you to have full authority over the machine, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The negative side, though, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to invest money in the license, which is typically more expensive if purchased for an entire web hosting server.

Using a web hosting provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the best thing to do is 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 in exchange for a given tax. The web servers are held in data centers with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to guarantee constant network connectivity.

Varieties of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a deep sea and there are a plethora of web hosting corporations delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website owners out there. The hosting services range from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated web hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what hosting type fulfills your needs?

If you own a small or mid-sized web site that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that multiple clients and web sites are hosted on one and the very same web hosting server, thus reducing the price of the service. Shared accounts usually have CPU, memory, traffic and hosting space quotas to make certain that the web sites hosted on the web server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

In case your site is more popular, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allocated to each individual virtual private web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that use the system resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual web server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to consider a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is utilized only by you for your own web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you are bestowed with root access, can choose the hardware in advance, implement updates later on and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Find your web hosting vendor

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a vague idea that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to select a web hosting accounts provider. The smartest step to take is to discover a web hosting corporation that offers an immense variety of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch web hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a virtual private web server hosting solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution. We, for instance, offer inexpensive shared website hosting plans, reasonably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server hosting plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated server web hosting packages. We also offer free extras - the shared website hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server web hosting plans and dedicated hosting plans include a charge-free domain reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-class 24/7/365 client support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, by all means, discover other hosting firms depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by reading different online hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, though, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have servers in the States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer lots of domain name extensions for registration.