How Does Web Hosting Function?

If you want to launch a website and make it visible to the whole world, it must be hosted on a web server. This service is known as is web hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your website on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to seek a more dependable website hosting service than that. If you would like to set up a real website, however, which will be accessible to many persons and you want to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable web server where you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your site?

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your web browser, however, is not the best and easiest way to access a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. Thus, to establish your site, you require your own domain and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT expert and understand how to deal with a server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exercise full control over the web hosting server, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The weak side, however, is that you will have to ensure the uptime of your site and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to spend money on the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for an entire web server.

Using a hosting supplier

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance duties, the wisest step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The web hosting servers are housed in datacenter facilities with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to ensure uninterrupted Internet access.

Varieties of web hosting services

The web is an immense sea and there are a myriad of hosting distributors delivering various hosting services to the myriad of web site owners out there. The hosting services range from cost-free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web sites, to costly dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what hosting type meets your needs?

If you own a small or average-size site that has several hundred guests max, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting means that plenty of hosting user accounts and sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus curtailing the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts usually have central processing unit, memory, web traffic and hosting server hard disk space quotas to ensure that the websites hosted on the web server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allocated.

If your web site is more popular, you should choose a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and central processing unit shares are assigned to each single private virtual hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that share the resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to get a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is utilized exclusively by you for your very own personal website needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you get complete root-level access, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades later on and install RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.

Pick your web hosting accounts provider

If you have an idea of what your site is going to be composed of, or if you have just a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your website should be to select a hosting supplier. The most intelligent step to take is to discover a web hosting firm that delivers an enormous range of hosting services so that you do not need to swap web hosts in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to upgrade to a virtual server solution or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for instance, distribute low-cost shared website hosting plans, budget-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web hosting server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel and even dedicated hosting server packages. We also offer cost-free bounties - the shared web hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual web server hosting plans and dedicated hosting plans come with a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the superb 24-7-365 client support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, of course, find other web hosting vendors depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by reading different online hosting reviews. The most intelligent option, however, is a web host that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have web servers in the USA, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain name extensions for registration.