Shared Hosting Description
If you desire to create a web site and render it visible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a web server. This service is known as is shared hosting.
Host your site at home or somewhere else
You could host your site on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a buddy of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to look for a more reliable hosting service than that. If you want to set up an actual web site, though, which will be visible to numerous individuals and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable server on which you will host it.
Why do you require a hosting server for your website?
When you own a website, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and quickest means to reach a web site. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you need one for your site. So, to establish your site, you require your own personal domain and a server to host your web site on.
Hosting your web site yourself
If you are an IT professional and understand how to manage a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exert full control over the hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The downside, however, is that you will need to guarantee the visibility of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which is normally more costly if bought for an entire web hosting server.
Using a web hosting vendor
If you don't want to take care of server maintenance tasks, the most logical step to take is to register an account with a web hosting company. These are companies that offer customers powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a given fee. The web servers are situated in data center facilities with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee uninterrupted service uptime.
Varieties of web hosting services
The World Wide Web is an immense sea and there are a lot of web hosting vendors providing various hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The hosting services range from free web hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what hosting type suits your needs?
If you run a small or mid-size site that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting implies that lots of hosting customers and sites are accommodated on the same server, thus decreasing the price of the service. Shared web hosting accounts usually have central processing unit, RAM memory, bandwidth and hosting server hard disk space quotas to make sure that the web sites hosted on the web server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are assigned.
In case your website is more frequently visited, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated 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 server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are assigned to each individual private virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to consider a dedicated web hosting server.
The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you hire, which is utilized just by you for your very own personal web site needs. No one else shares its system resources and you receive full root privileges, can select a hardware configuration in advance, apply updates at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.
Choose your web hosting distributor
If you know what your site is going to consist of, or if you have only a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your website should be to discover a hosting accounts provider. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a hosting solutions provider that provides a large selection of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to change web hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to move to a virtual private hosting server solution or a dedicated web server solution. We, for instance, deliver cut-rate shared website hosting plans, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web servers, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated server plans. We also offer free-of-charge bounties - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server hosting plans and dedicated server hosting plans include a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the topflight 24-7-365 support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, certainly, discover other hosting firms depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by checking additional online hosting reviews. The most suitable option, however, is a hosting accounts provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have servers in the USA, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer multiple domain name extensions for registration.