How Shared Web Hosting Works

If you wish to set up a web site and render it available for the whole world to see, it must be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is shared web hosting.

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more advanced web hosting service than that. If you desire to establish an actual website, however, which will be accessible to numerous persons and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable hosting server on which you will host it.

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

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your browser, however, is not the best and quickest method to open a web site. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your website. Thus, to establish your website, you need your own domain name and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to manage a web server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exercise full authority over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The downside, however, is that you will have to ensure the availability of your website and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is typically more expensive if bought for a whole web hosting server.

Using a web hosting supplier

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance tasks, the best step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting solutions provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The servers are located in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant network uptime.

Types of web hosting services

The web is a bottomless sea and there are a lot of hosting corporations delivering different hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what type of hosting suits your needs?

If you have a small or medium-sized web page that has a few hundred viewers tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting means that numerous shared web hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the same server, thus trimming the price of the service. Shared accounts normally include CPU, RAM memory, bandwidth and disk space usage quotas to make sure that the web sites hosted on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allotted.

In case your web site is more resource-swallowing, you should pick a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated servers web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are allotted to each single virtual web hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that share the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to get a dedicated web server.

The dedicated server web hosting is a server that you rent, which is used solely by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you gain full root privileges, can select a hardware architecture in advance, implement updates later on and install RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.

Find your hosting provider

If you have a notion of what your site is going to consist of, or if you have only a loose idea that has not fully matured yet, your initial move towards the creation of your website should be to choose a web host. The most logical step to take is to discover a web hosting firm that provides a big variety of website hosting services so that you do not need to switch providers if you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to move to a VPS solution or a dedicated server web hosting solution. We, for example, deliver reasonably priced shared web hosting plans, discounted OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server web hosting packages. We also offer free-of-cost extras - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced virtual server hosting plans and dedicated server packages come with a charge-free domain reseller account and billing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-rate 24/7/365 customer support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, by all means, discover other web hosting suppliers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by reading additional hosting reviews. The smartest choice, though, is a hosting services provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites met by us. We have web hosting servers in America, in England and in Australia, and offer a plethora of domain extensions for registration.