How Website Hosting Works

If you would like to build a web site and render it available for the whole world to see, it has to be located on a server. The name of this service is website hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a personal 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 seek a more reliable website hosting service than that. If you would like to build a real website, though, which will be visible to numerous individuals and you desire to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your web site?

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the IP address of the physical server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and easiest method to visit a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your site. Hence, to create your website, you require your own domain and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to take care of a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to have full authority over the machine, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, though, is that you will need to guarantee the accessibility of your web site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is usually more high-priced if purchased for an entire server.

Using a hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the best step to take is to register an account with a web hosting vendor. These are firms that offer customers powerful web servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The servers are held in datacenters with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure continuous Internet access.

Kinds of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a deep sea and there are a myriad of hosting firms delivering different hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can drain your funds. So, what web hosting type matches your demands?

If you run a small or mid-size web page that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that plenty of shared web hosting customers and websites are accommodated on the same server, thus curtailing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts normally have central processing unit, memory, web traffic and disk drive space usage quotas to ensure that the web sites hosted on the web server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are assigned.

In case your web site is more resource-requiring, you should opt for a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root access, which permits you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allocated to each single private virtual hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside your own that share the resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in most cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to order a dedicated web server.

The dedicated web hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is utilized only by you for your very own personal website needs. No one else uses its resources and you obtain complete root access, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, implement updates later on and add RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Pick your web hosting distributor

If you know what your website is going to include, or if you have only a loose idea that has not fully evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your web site should be to pick a hosting services provider. The best thing to do is find a hosting provider that supplies a large selection of website hosting services so that you do not need to swap hosting providers if you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to migrate to a virtual private web server or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, furnish affordable shared hosting plans, discounted OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated hosting web server packages. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced private virtual web hosting server packages and dedicated server packages come with a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the high-quality round-the-clock customer support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, without a doubt, discover other web hosting distributors depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by examining different online hosting reviews. The best option, however, is a hosting services provider that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have servers in the USA, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain extensions for registration.