Shared Hosting Definition

If you would like to build a website and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web server. The name of this service is shared hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a mate of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more powerful hosting service than that. If you wish to build a real website, though, which will be accessible to multiple visitors and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a dependable hosting server on which you will host it.

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

When you have a website, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your web browser, however, is not the best and most suitable means to access a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your website. Therefore, to set up your website, you need a domain of your own and a web server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an IT expert and know how to cope with a server, you can have a server of your own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exert full control over the server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, though, is that you will have to ensure the availability of your site and to deal with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to pay for the license, which is typically more costly if bought for a whole machine.

Using a web hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the smartest step to take is to register an account with a web hosting supplier. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The web servers are held in data centers with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure continuous network connectivity.

Kinds of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is a broad sea and there are plenty of hosting distributors offering various hosting services to the myriad of web site proprietors out there. The hosting services range from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what hosting type satisfies your requirements?

If you have a small or mid-sized web site that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that lots of web hosting clients and web sites are hosted on one and the same web server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts usually include central processing unit, RAM memory, web traffic and web hosting server hard disk storage space usage quotas to guarantee that the sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allocated.

In case your web site is more resource-consuming, you should pick a virtual private servers hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allocated to each single virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside your own that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most circumstances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the VPS web server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to order a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a physical server that you lease, which is used only by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you obtain root access, can choose the hardware in advance, implement upgrades later on and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.

Choose your web hosting plans provider

If you have an idea of what your website is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely matured yet, your very first step towards the creation of your website should be to select a web host. The best step to take is to discover a web hosting company that distributes a broad assortment of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to change web hosting service providers if you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to move to a virtual private hosting server or a dedicated server. We, for instance, supply cut-rate shared website hosting packages, inexpensive OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS server plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated server web hosting packages. We also offer free-of-cost gifts - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS web hosting server plans and dedicated server packages offer a free-of-charge domain name reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the first-class 24x7 client support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, without a doubt, discover other web hosting service providers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by checking different online hosting reviews. The most relevant option, though, is a web host that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have web servers in the States, in Britain and in Australia, and offer lots of domain name extensions for registration.