What Does Website Hosting Signify?

If you desire to launch a website and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a hosting server. The name of this service is website hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to seek a more advanced website hosting solution than that. If you want to establish a real web site, though, which will be reachable by numerous visitors and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a dependable web hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your website?

When you own a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP address of the physical server in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most suitable method to visit a web site. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you need one for your website. Hence, to set up your site, you need a domain of your own and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an Information Technology professional and know how to take care of a hosting server, you can have a web server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to have complete control over the web server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The downside, however, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your web site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend money on the license, which is usually more costly if bought for an entire web server.

Using a hosting distributor

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to sign up for an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The servers are stored in data center facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to ensure continuous Internet access.

Varieties of hosting services

The web is an immense ocean and there are a lot of web hosting corporations delivering various hosting services to the myriad of web site owners out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what type of hosting satisfies your demands?

If you run a small or mid-size site that has several hundred viewers tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that numerous shared web hosting user accounts and web sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus decreasing the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts usually involve CPU, RAM, web traffic and web hosting server hard drive storage space quotas to guarantee that the web sites accommodated on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allocated.

If your web site is more resource-swallowing, you should opt for a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root privileges, which permits you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allotted to each individual VPS web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that make use of the resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the resources of the VPS server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to consider a dedicated web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you rent, which is used exclusively by you for your very own personal website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you are given full root-level access, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, apply updates at a later time and add RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your web hosting supplier

If you have a vision of what your site is going to consist of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely matured yet, your initial move towards the creation of your web site should be to find a web hosting plans provider. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a hosting distributor that supplies an extensive range of hosting solutions so that you do not have to change hosting providers in case you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to upgrade to a private virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated web server solution. We, for example, distribute budget-priced shared website hosting plans, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web hosting servers, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server packages. We also offer free-of-cost presents - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful virtual web server packages and dedicated web servers offer a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the topflight 24/7/365 technical support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, without a doubt, find other hosting corporations depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by reading different online web hosting reviews. The wisest option, however, is a web hosting vendor that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have web servers in the United States, in England and in Australia, and offer many domain name extensions for registration.