How Does Hosting Function?

If you wish to launch a website and render it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be hosted on a hosting server. This service is called is hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more powerful hosting service than that. If you would like to develop a real website, though, which will be visible to multiple people and you wish to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable server where you will host it.

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

When you have a site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the physical machine in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most suitable way to reach a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you are in need of one for your website. Thus, to establish your website, you require a domain of your own and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site yourself

If you are an IT pro and understand how to handle a hosting server, you can have a web server of your own and host your site on it. This will enable you to exert complete control over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The weakness, however, is that you will need to ensure the uptime of your site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which is normally more costly if purchased for a whole web hosting server.

Using a hosting packages provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the most logical step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The web hosting servers are located in data centers with special cooling and UPS systems to guarantee uninterrupted service uptime.

Kinds of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a bottomless sea and there are a myriad of hosting service providers offering various hosting services to the plethora of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from charge-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based sites, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what hosting type fulfills your requirements?

If you own a small or medium-size web page that has a few hundred viewers tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that plenty of users and sites are hosted on one and the very same web server, thus reducing the price of the service. Shared accounts normally have central processing unit, RAM, traffic and hosting space quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

If your web site is more resource-requiring, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are allocated to each single VPS hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other VPSs beside yours that avail of the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in most circumstances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to switch to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a physical server that you hire, which is used only by you for your own web site needs. No one else uses its resources and you are given full server root privileges, can select a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades later on and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.

Find your web hosting provider

If you have an idea of what your website is going to be composed of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your site should be to discover a web hosting solutions provider. The best thing to do is find a hosting distributor that supplies a large array of web hosting services so that you do not need to change web hosting providers if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to migrate to a VPS hosting solution or a dedicated hosting web server. We, for instance, furnish cut-rate shared website hosting plans, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting servers. We also offer free bounties - the shared website hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful private virtual server plans and dedicated web server hosting plans come with a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the superb 24-7 customer support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, by all means, find other web hosts depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading additional hosting reviews online. The most reasonable option, however, is a web hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the United States of America, in Britain and in Australia, and offer multiple domain extensions for registration.