How Shared Web Hosting Operates

If you desire to set up a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a web server. This service is known as is shared web hosting.

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to discover a more powerful hosting solution than that. If you wish to build an actual web site, however, which will be reachable by many viewers and you wish to make it dependable, you will also require a dependable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your web site?

When you own a site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most convenient way to reach a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you need one for your site. Thus, to establish your site, you need a domain name of your own and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology pro and know how to take care of a server, you can have a server of your very own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exert complete control over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The weak side, though, is that you will have to guarantee the availability of your site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is usually more high-priced if purchased for a whole server.

Using a hosting packages provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance tasks, the wisest step to take is to open an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The servers are kept in data center facilities with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee continuous Internet access.

Kinds of web hosting services

The Internet is a wide sea and there are plenty of hosting suppliers offering different hosting services to the myriad of web site proprietors out there. The hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated web hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what type of web hosting suits your needs?

If you own a small or average-size website that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that many users and websites are hosted on one and the very same server, thus decreasing the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts usually have CPU, memory, web traffic and web hosting space usage quotas to guarantee that the sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.

In case your website is larger, you should select a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers web hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - 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 allocated to each single VPS, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS web hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to switch to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated server web hosting is a server that you rent, which is utilized exclusively by you for your own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you obtain full root access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, add upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have just a loose idea that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your web site should be to pick a web hosting provider. The most intelligent step to take is to discover a web hosting solutions provider that provides a broad range of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to change web hosts in case you first use a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to migrate to a virtual web server hosting solution or a dedicated server solution. We, for example, furnish inexpensive shared website hosting plans, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web server packages. We also offer free bonuses - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced private virtual hosting servers and dedicated server plans offer a free domain name reseller account and billing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great round-the-clock customer service and you have all you would normally need. You could, of course, discover other web hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different online web hosting reviews. The most suitable option, though, is a web hosting vendor that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have hosting servers in the US, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer lots of domain extensions for registration.