Shared Hosting Definition

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

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to discover a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you wish to launch a real web site, however, which will be visible to a lot of visitors and you wish to make it reliable, you will also need a stable web server where you will host it.

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

When you own a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your web browser, though, is not the best and simplest method to access a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you need one for your website. Therefore, to launch your web site, you need a domain name of your own and a web server to host your site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT expert and understand how to cope with a web hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have full authority over the physical machine, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The drawback, though, is that you will have to guarantee the visibility of your site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are availing of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is usually more costly if bought for an entire web hosting server.

Using a web hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance tasks, the most intelligent step to take is to register an account with a web hosting vendor. These are firms that offer customers powerful web servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The web hosting servers are held in data centers with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee uninterrupted Internet access.

Kinds of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a boundless ocean and there are a plethora of hosting service providers offering various hosting services to the plethora of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based web sites, to high-priced dedicated hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what type of web hosting conforms to your requirements?

If you have a small or average-sized web page that has a few hundred viewers tops, you could safely resort to a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that lots of shared web hosting user accounts and sites are accommodated on the very same hosting server, thus reducing the price of the service. Shared accounts usually include central processing unit, memory, web traffic and server hard drive space quotas to make certain that the sites accommodated on the web server do not intervene with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allotted.

In case your web site is larger, you should consider a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are allocated to each individual VPS web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that use the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in most instances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the private virtual hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is clearly time to shift to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you rent, which is used solely by you for your own website needs. No one else shares its resources and you are granted full server root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, implement updates later on and install 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 server you can revise the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Select your hosting services provider

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to include, or if you have just a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your very first move towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a hosting vendor. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a web hosting plans provider that delivers an extensive selection of web hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a VPS or a dedicated server. We, for example, provide low-priced shared web hosting plans, reasonably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server hosting plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web servers. We also offer free presents - the shared web hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS hosting plans and dedicated web hosting packages come with a free-of-charge domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the great 24/7 customer support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, by all means, find other hosting companies depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by checking additional hosting reviews online. The most appropriate option, though, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the United States of America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain name extensions for registration.