What Exactly is Shared Hosting?

If you desire to create a website and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your site on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you want to launch an actual website, though, which will be reachable by plenty of people and you wish to make it dependable, you will also need a stable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your website?

When you own a web site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the machine in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and quickest method to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. Hence, to launch your site, you require a domain name of your own and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an IT professional and understand how to cope with a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will permit you to have full authority over the physical server, to make server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The negative side, though, is that you will have to ensure the uptime of your web site and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also have to invest money in the license, which normally costs more if purchased for a whole physical machine.

Using a hosting plans provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the most relevant step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The web servers are held in data centers with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee uninterrupted website availability.

Kinds of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is an immense sea and there are a plethora of service providers offering different hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The web hosting services range from free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your finances. So, what web hosting type matches your needs?

If you have a small or mid-sized web page that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that numerous shared web hosting accounts and sites are accommodated on the very same hosting server, thus reducing the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts commonly involve central processing unit, RAM, traffic and disk drive storage space usage quotas to guarantee that the websites accommodated on the web server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are apportioned.

If your site is more resource-demanding, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers full root privileges, which enables you to make server configuration changes - 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 portions are allotted to each individual virtual web server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that share the resources of the physical server, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in most cases it is not a problem. Should the resources of the VPS server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to order a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical server that you hire, which is used just by you for your own personal website needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you are granted full server root access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can update the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.

Choose your hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your website is going to consist of, or if you have just a vague idea that has not fully matured yet, your very first step towards the creation of your website should be to pick a web hosting accounts provider. The wisest step to take is to find a hosting supplier that provides an immense range of web hosting services so that you do not have to change hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a VPS web server solution or a dedicated web server. We, for instance, provide budget-priced shared website hosting plans, cheap OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server plans. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared website hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual web server plans and dedicated web server hosting plans offer a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the high-quality 24/7/365 support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, undoubtedly, discover other hosting companies depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, though, is a hosting accounts provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have hosting servers in America, in Britain and in Australia, and offer numerous domain extensions for registration.