Explanation of Hosting
If you wish to launch a website and make it available for the whole world to see, it has to be hosted on a hosting server. The name of this service is hosting.
Host your site at home or in another place
You could host your site on your own computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a chum of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more reliable hosting solution than that. If you would like to set up a real web site, however, which will be reachable by a lot of people and you want to make it dependable, you will also require a stable web server where you will host it.
Why do you require a web server for your web site?
When you own a website, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and easiest means to access a website. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your website. So, to launch your website, you require a domain of your own and a hosting server to host your website on.
Hosting your web site yourself
If you are an IT specialist and know how to take care of a web server, you can have a server of your very own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exert full control over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center personnel. The drawback, though, is that you will need to ensure the uptime of your website and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which usually costs more if bought for an entire server.
Using a web hosting plans provider
If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the best thing to do is sign up for an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a given tax. The web hosting servers are situated in data centers with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to ensure continuous service uptime.
Varieties of hosting services
The World Wide Web is a deep sea and there are many service providers delivering various hosting services to the multitude of web site possessors out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated web hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what web hosting type fits your requirements?
If you own a small or average-size website that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting implies that multiple shared hosting accounts and sites are accommodated on one and the very same web server, thus lowering the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts commonly involve CPU, RAM memory, traffic and web server disk drive storage space usage quotas to make certain that the web sites accommodated on the hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.
In case your website is busier, you should consider 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 access, which allows you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web server. The VPSs 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 VPSs beside yours that make use of the resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most circumstances it's of no concern. Should the resources of the VPS server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to move to a dedicated web server.
The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you rent, which is used just by you for your very own website needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you have full server root access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades later on and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.
Choose your web hosting provider
If you have an idea of what your site is going to contain, or if you have just a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a web host. The most relevant step to take is to discover a hosting vendor that delivers a wide selection of web hosting solutions so that you do not have to change hosting service providers in case you first use a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to migrate to a private virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated web hosting solution. We, for example, provide budget-priced shared hosting plans, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private hosting server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web server packages. We also offer free presents - the shared web hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced VPSs and dedicated hosting plans offer a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great 24-7 customer support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, of course, discover other web hosting firms depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by reading additional hosting reviews online. The smartest option, however, is a web host that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both requirements met by us. We have hosting servers in the States, in England and in Australia, and offer a multitude of domain name extensions for registration.