How Website Hosting Works

If you wish to build a site and render it visible to the whole world, it has to be located on a hosting server. This service is called is website hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own personal PC at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a friend of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more dependable hosting solution than that. If you wish to develop a real web site, though, which will be accessible to numerous persons and you want to make it dependable, you will also require a stable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your site?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP of the physical server in your web browser, though, is not the best and most convenient way to access a website. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your site. So, to establish your website, you need a domain name of your own and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT professional and understand how to handle a web server, you can have a server of your very own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exert complete authority over the physical machine, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The disadvantage, though, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also have to invest money in the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for an entire web server.

Using a hosting services provider

If you don't want to handle server maintenance tasks, the most reasonable step to take is to open an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The web servers are kept in datacenters with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to guarantee continuous website accessibility.

Types of hosting services

The web is a bottomless ocean and there are numerous hosting companies delivering various hosting services to the myriad of website possessors out there. The hosting services vary from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to high-priced dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what web hosting type corresponds to your demands?

If you have a small or mid-size web site that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely make use of a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that lots of web hosting users and web sites are hosted on the very same hosting server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts commonly have CPU, memory, web traffic and web hosting server disk drive space usage quotas to make certain that the sites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are assigned.

If your web site is busier, you should consider a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allotted to each single virtual server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the resources of the private virtual web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to order a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a server that you rent, which is utilized only by you for your own web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you have complete root access, can choose the hardware in advance, add updates at a later time and add RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Find your hosting vendor

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to include, or if you have only a vague plan that has not fully evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to discover a hosting packages provider. The best course of action is to find a web hosting plans provider that supplies a broad variety of website hosting services so that you do not have to change service providers if you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to migrate to a VPS web hosting server or a dedicated server solution. We, for example, offer cut-rate shared website hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web server hosting packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated server hosting packages. We also offer free-of-cost presents - the shared hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server web hosting packages and dedicated hosting web server plans come with a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the topflight 24-7-365 customer support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, by all means, find other hosting corporations depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by checking additional hosting reviews online. The best choice, though, is a hosting services provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have web hosting servers in the US, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.