What Does Website Hosting Mean?
If you wish to launch a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it must be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is website hosting.
Host your site at home or elsewhere
You could host your website on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more stable website hosting service than that. If you desire to build an actual web site, though, which will be reachable by lots of viewers and you want to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable server on which you will host it.
Why do you need a hosting server for your site?
When you own a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and quickest means to open a web site. That is how and why domains came into being and why you need one for your website. Hence, to establish your website, you require your own domain and a server to host your site on.
Hosting your website yourself
If you are an IT specialist and understand how to deal with a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to have full control over the machine, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The disadvantage, though, is that you will have to guarantee the visibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is normally more costly if purchased for an entire machine.
Using a hosting distributor
If you don't want to carry out server maintenance procedures, the best step to take is to open an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web servers with various hardware configurations for a certain tax. The servers are kept in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to ensure uninterrupted service uptime.
Kinds of hosting services
The web is an endless sea and there are a multitude of web hosting companies offering various hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to costly dedicated web hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what type of web hosting conforms to your demands?
If you possess a small or average-size web page that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting signifies that numerous shared web hosting clients and websites are hosted on one and the very same web server, thus slashing the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts ordinarily include CPU, RAM, web traffic and web content space usage quotas to guarantee that the web sites accommodated on the web server do not intervene with each other and do not use more resources than they are apportioned.
In case your web site is more popular, you should choose a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, which enables you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are allotted to each individual private virtual web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that make use of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to order a dedicated web hosting server.
The dedicated web hosting is a physical machine that you rent, which is used just by you for your own website needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you acquire complete root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, implement 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 virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.
Choose your web hosting services provider
If you have a notion of what your site is going to contain, or if you have just a vague idea that has not fully matured yet, your very first move towards the creation of your website should be to discover a hosting solutions provider. The best course of action is to discover a web hosting distributor that provides a large selection of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch providers in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to switch to a virtual web server solution or a dedicated server hosting solution. We, for example, offer moderately priced shared website hosting packages, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server plans, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated hosting web server packages. We also offer free-of-charge bounties - the shared website hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful virtual web hosting servers and dedicated web hosting packages come with a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the high-quality 24x7 customer support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, doubtlessly, find other hosting service providers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by checking additional web hosting reviews online. The best option, though, is a web hosting solutions provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have servers in the USA, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer numerous domain name extensions for registration.