Shared Hosting Defined

If you want to build a site and make it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

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

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

When you own a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical server in your web browser, though, is not the best and quickest means to open a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your web site. Thus, to create your site, you need your own domain name and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology professional and know how to manage a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will allow you to exercise complete control over the web hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The weak side, though, is that you will need to ensure the accessibility of your site and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which is typically more high-priced if bought for a whole physical machine.

Using a hosting services provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the smartest step to take is to register an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The web servers are placed in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to guarantee continuous Internet connectivity.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is a deep ocean and there are lots of service providers delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website possessors out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what hosting type conforms to your requirements?

If you own a small or average-sized website that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that plenty of shared web hosting user accounts and web sites are hosted on the very same server, thus decreasing the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts usually include central processing unit, RAM memory, bandwidth and hosting space quotas to make sure that the sites hosted on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allocated.

In case your website is more popular, 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 acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, 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 RAM memory options. Separate RAM and CPU shares are assigned to each single private virtual server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside your own that utilize the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to consider a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a server that you hire, which is used just by you for your own personal web site needs. No one else uses its system resources and you have full server root privileges, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades later on and add RAM or hard disks. 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 hosting server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Choose your web host

If you have a notion of what your website is going to comprise, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your site should be to choose a hosting services provider. The best step to take is to find a web hosting provider that provides an enormous selection of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap providers if you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to switch to a private virtual server solution or a dedicated web server hosting solution. We, for instance, deliver affordably priced shared hosting packages, low-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated web servers. We also offer charge-free bonuses - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced VPS web hosting plans and dedicated hosting web server plans include a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-class 24/7/365 client support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, doubtlessly, discover other web hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different web hosting reviews. The best option, however, is a web hosting services provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have web servers in the United States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer many domain extensions for registration.