How Shared Web Hosting Works

If you want to build a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a web server. The name of this service is shared web hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a mate of yours, etc. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more reliable web hosting service than that. If you would like to establish a real web site, though, which will be accessible to many individuals and you wish to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web hosting server for your website?

When you own a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your browser, however, is not the best and most appropriate method to open a website. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you need one for your website. Therefore, to launch your site, you require a domain name of your own and a web hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an Information Technology specialist and understand how to take care of a server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to exercise complete control over the hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The disadvantage, however, is that you will have to guarantee the availability of your site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which typically costs more if bought for an entire server.

Using a hosting provider

If you don't want to handle server maintenance duties, the smartest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The servers are housed in datacenters with special cooling and UPS systems to guarantee uninterrupted Internet access.

Types of hosting services

The web is an immense ocean and there are lots of web hosting providers offering different hosting services to the plethora of web site proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from cost-free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what type of web hosting meets your demands?

If you possess a small or mid-sized web site that has several hundred viewers tops, you could safely resort to a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that plenty of web hosting customers and web sites are accommodated on the very same server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts commonly involve central processing unit, RAM, traffic and hosting server disk storage space usage quotas to make sure that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your web site is more resource-devouring, you should opt for 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 access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allocated to each single private virtual server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to order a dedicated server.

The dedicated server web hosting is a server that you hire, which is utilized exclusively by you for your own personal website needs. No one else shares its system resources and you obtain full root privileges, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Select your hosting vendor

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to be composed of, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your website should be to discover a hosting distributor. The best solution is to find a service provider that furnishes an immense assortment of website hosting services so that you do not need to switch hosts if you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to move to a private virtual web hosting server or a dedicated web hosting solution. We, for example, distribute cut-rate shared website hosting plans, low-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server plans, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting web server plans. We also offer free-of-cost gifts - the shared website hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced virtual private hosting server packages and dedicated hosting web server plans offer a free-of-charge domain reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the top-notch 24x7 technical support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, certainly, discover other web hosting providers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by checking different online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, though, is a hosting provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States, in England and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain extensions for registration.