How Does Web Hosting Work?

If you want to build a site and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a hosting server. This service is called is web hosting.

Host your site at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a buddy of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you desire to develop an actual web site, however, which will be accessible to a lot of viewers and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a stable web hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you need a hosting server for your site?

When you own a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the IP of the machine in your browser, though, is not the best and most appropriate method to reach a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you are in need of one for your website. Therefore, to establish your website, you require your own personal domain name and a web hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology pro and understand how to tackle a server, you can have a web server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exercise full control over the hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The negative side, though, is that you will have to ensure the accessibility of your site and to take care of all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend cash on the license, which is typically more high-priced if bought for an entire machine.

Using a hosting services provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the wisest step to take is to open an account with a web hosting company. These are companies that offer clients powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a certain tax. The servers are housed in data centers with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant website availability.

Types of hosting services

The Internet is a wide sea and there are many web hosting vendors offering different hosting services to the myriad of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your monthly budget dry. So, what type of web hosting satisfies your needs?

If you own a small or average-size web page that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that plenty of user accounts and sites are hosted on the very same server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts commonly include CPU, RAM, web traffic and web hosting server hard drive storage space quotas to ensure that the websites hosted on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allocated.

If your web site is more resource-devouring, you should choose a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root privileges, 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 CPU portions are allotted to each individual VPS, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside yours that share the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it is not a problem. Should the resources of the VPS web hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to migrate to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you rent, which is used only by you for your very own web site needs. No one else uses its system resources and you obtain full root-level access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, apply upgrades later on and install RAM or hard drives. 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 web server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Choose your web hosting plans provider

If you have an idea of what your website is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague idea that has not fully evolved yet, your first move towards the creation of your site should be to select a web hosting services provider. The most reasonable step to take is to find a web hosting packages provider that delivers a broad array of web hosting solutions so that you do not have to change hosting providers if you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a Virtual Private Server web hosting solution or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, furnish low-priced shared hosting packages, moderately priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated hosting web server plans. We also offer free-of-cost presents - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful VPS server plans and dedicated web hosting server packages offer a charge-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-rate 24-7-365 support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, by all means, find other hosting firms depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by examining additional online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, however, is a web hosting services provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both preconditions fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the US, in Britain and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain extensions for registration.