If you desire to set up a site and render it visible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a web server. This service is known as
shared hosting.
Host your web site at home or somewhere else.
You could host your website on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a mate of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more reliable
hosting service than that. If you want to establish an actual web site, however, which will be reachable by plenty of persons and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server on which you will host it.
Why do you require a web hosting server for your web site?
When you have a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the IP of the server in your web browser, though, is not the best and most convenient way to reach a web site. That is how and why
domain names came into existence and why you are in need of one for your site. So, to set up your site, you need your own domain name and a hosting server to host your site on.
Hosting your website yourself
If you are an Information Technology pro and know how to manage a web server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exert complete control over the server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The downside, though, is that you will have to ensure the uptime of your site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for an entire machine.
Using a hosting supplier
If you don't want to take care of server maintenance tasks, the most logical step to take is to open an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given fee. The web hosting servers are kept in datacenters with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure constant service uptime.
Varieties of hosting services
The Internet is a broad ocean and there are a myriad of web hosting distributors offering different hosting services to the plethora of website owners out there. The web hosting services vary from free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what hosting type matches your requirements?
If you own a small or average-size web site that has several hundred guests tops, you could safely use a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that a lot of shared web hosting accounts and web sites are hosted on the very same web server, thus lowering the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts usually include CPU, RAM memory, traffic and web hosting server disk storage space quotas to guarantee that the sites hosted on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allotted.
If your site is more resource-swallowing, you should select a
virtual private servers hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the
dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which enables you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are allocated to each single VPS web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other
virtual private servers apart from yours that use the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most circumstances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual private web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to move to a dedicated hosting web server.
The
dedicated servers is a physical machine that you hire, which is utilized solely by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you receive full root-level access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.
Pick your web hosting supplier
If you have a vision of what your web site is going to include, or if you have just a vague idea that has not fully matured yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to find a web hosting services provider. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a service provider that distributes a wide range of web hosting services so that you do not have to switch hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to move to a VPS web server or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, distribute
cut-price shared hosting packages, moderately priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web hosting server packages,
semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated server hosting packages. We also offer free-of-charge bounties - the shared web hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual server hosting plans and dedicated web server hosting packages come with a free domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the exceptional 24-7-365 technical support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, doubtlessly, discover other web hosting service providers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading different web hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, though, is a hosting packages provider that is also a
domain registrar and has servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have servers in North America, in Britain and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.
