Shared Web Hosting Defined

If you want to create a website and render it available for the whole world to see, it has to be hosted on a server. The name of this service is shared web hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a pal of yours, and so on. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more advanced hosting service than that. If you desire to establish an actual web site, however, which will be visible to numerous visitors and you wish to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable web server where you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your website?

When you have a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the IP address of the server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and simplest way to access a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your site. So, to launch your site, you need a domain name of your own and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an Information Technology professional and understand how to take care of a hosting server, you can have a web hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exert full authority over the web server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The disadvantage, however, is that you will need to ensure the availability of your web site and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is usually more expensive if purchased for a whole machine.

Using a hosting provider

If you don't want to perform server maintenance duties, the smartest step to take is to register an account with a web hosting supplier. These are firms that offer customers powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web servers are situated in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant Internet connection.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is a vast ocean and there are plenty of web hosting providers offering various hosting services to the plethora of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what type of hosting fulfills your demands?

If you have a small or average-sized web page that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that lots of user accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the same web server, thus slashing the price of the service. Shared accounts usually include central processing unit, RAM memory, traffic and web server hard drive space quotas to guarantee that the sites accommodated on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.

If your web site is busier, you should choose a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated servers web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory 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 beside yours that make use of the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual private web hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is clearly time to order a dedicated web server.

The dedicated server web hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is used solely by you for your very own web site needs. No one else shares its system resources and you gain full root access, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades at a later time and add RAM or disk drives. 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 web hosting server you can update the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your web hosting solutions provider

If you know what your site is going to comprise, or if you have just a vague idea that has not fully evolved yet, your first step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting distributor. The most reasonable step to take is to find a web hosting company that supplies a large selection of hosting services so that you do not need to change hosts if you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to upgrade to a VPS web server solution or a dedicated server hosting solution. We, for instance, offer cheap shared website hosting packages, moderately priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web hosting server plans, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server hosting plans. We also offer free gifts - the shared web hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced virtual server plans and dedicated web hosting server plans include a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the high-quality 24-7 customer support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, without a doubt, discover other web hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by reading different online hosting reviews. The most reasonable choice, though, is a hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have servers in the US, in Britain and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain extensions for registration.