Hosting Unmasked

If you desire to create a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web server. This service is called is hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your web site on your own PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to seek a more powerful web hosting solution than that. If you want to develop an actual web site, though, which will be reachable by lots of visitors and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable web hosting server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your website?

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the IP address of the machine in your web browser, though, is not the best and most suitable means to access a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your site. Thus, to establish your website, you require your own domain name and a web hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology specialist and know how to take care of a server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will enable you to exert complete control over the server, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The downside, however, is that you will have to ensure the availability of your site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is typically more high-priced if purchased for an entire web hosting server.

Using a web hosting supplier

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the best solution is to register an account with a web hosting vendor. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are housed in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure uninterrupted network connectivity.

Kinds of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a broad sea and there are a multitude of hosting vendors offering various hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from cost-free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated web hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what web hosting type corresponds to your needs?

If you own a small or medium-size web site that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting means that multiple shared web hosting user accounts and websites are accommodated on the very same web server, thus curtailing the price of the service. Shared accounts normally include CPU, RAM, bandwidth and data space quotas to ensure that the sites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allocated.

If your site is more resource-devouring, you should opt for a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root access, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU shares are allotted to each individual virtual private hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other VPSs apart from yours that avail of the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to move to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated packages is a physical machine that you lease, which is utilized just by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you have full server root privileges, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades later on and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting vendor

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to comprise, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your web site should be to find a web hosting accounts provider. The best thing to do is find a hosting accounts provider that offers a large selection of web hosting solutions so that you do not need to swap hosting providers in case you first avail of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to switch to a VPS web hosting solution or a dedicated hosting server. We, for instance, offer low-cost shared website hosting plans, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated server hosting packages. We also offer cost-free presents - the shared web hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced VPS hosting plans and dedicated server packages include a cost-free domain reseller account and billing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the first-class round-the-clock customer support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, certainly, discover other hosting vendors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by reading additional web hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, though, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have web servers in the United States of America, in Britain and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain extensions for registration.