How Does Web Hosting Operate?

If you want to build a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be hosted on a server. The name of this service is web hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own personal PC at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a chum of yours, and so on. If it is a site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to look for a more powerful website hosting service than that. If you wish to set up an actual website, however, which will be accessible to many individuals and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a stable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your web site?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the physical server in your browser, however, is not the best and easiest way 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 launch your site, you require your own personal domain and a hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an IT professional and know how to take care of a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your site on it. This will permit you to exercise complete authority over the web server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, though, is that you will need to ensure the availability of your web site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are availing of a licensed OS, you will also have to pay for the license, which is usually more costly if bought for an entire hosting server.

Using a web hosting plans provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance tasks, the most relevant step to take is to open an account with a web hosting supplier. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain tax. The hosting servers are physically located in datacenters with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to guarantee continuous network uptime.

Varieties of hosting services

The Internet is a large ocean and there are plenty of hosting providers delivering various hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can suck your funds dry. So, what type of web hosting matches your demands?

If you have a small or medium-sized web page that has several hundred guests max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that many hosting users and websites are hosted on the very same hosting server, thus lowering the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts normally involve CPU, RAM, traffic and web hosting server disk drive storage space usage quotas to ensure that the websites hosted on the server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are assigned.

If your website is more resource-consuming, 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 gives you full root-level access, which enables you to make server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are assigned to each single virtual private web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that make use of the resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it is not a problem. Should the resources of the VPS web server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to obtain a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is used only by you for your very own web site needs. No one else shares its resources and you are granted full server root access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, add upgrades at a later time and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting plans provider

If you have a notion of what your web site is going to include, or if you have just a vague idea that has not fully evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your web site should be to select a web hosting services provider. The wisest step to take is to discover a hosting services provider that delivers a vast selection of hosting services so that you do not have to change hosting service providers in case you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a VPS server solution or a dedicated server solution. We, for example, provide discounted shared website hosting packages, low-cost OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web server hosting plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web server packages. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared web hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual private web hosting servers and dedicated hosting web server plans come with a charge-free domain reseller account and billing software should you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the excellent 24/7 client support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, certainly, discover other web hosting firms depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different hosting reviews online. The best choice, though, is a hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the USA, in the UK and in Australia, and offer many domain extensions for registration.