What Actually is Shared Hosting
If you would like to build a web site and render it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is shared hosting.
Host your site at home or elsewhere
You could host your site on your own personal personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a pal of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to look for a more reliable hosting solution than that. If you want to launch an actual web site, however, which will be visible to many individuals and you wish to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable hosting server where you will host it.
Why do you need a web hosting server for your site?
When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the IP of the machine in your web browser, though, is not the best and simplest way to reach a website. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your website. Hence, to set up your website, you need your own domain name and a server to host your website on.
Hosting your site yourself
If you are an IT professional and understand how to administer a hosting server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to have complete authority over the hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The drawback, though, is that you will need to ensure the accessibility of your site and to take care of all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest money in the license, which is usually more costly if purchased for a whole physical server.
Using a hosting services provider
If you don't want to perform server maintenance duties, the most intelligent step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a certain tax. The web servers are placed in data center facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant website availability.
Varieties of web hosting services
The web is a vast ocean and there are a lot of web hosting corporations delivering different hosting services to the multitude of website possessors out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-charge hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web sites, to costly dedicated server hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what hosting type answers your demands?
If you have a small or average-size website that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely use a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that multiple web hosting clients and sites are hosted on one and the very same hosting server, thus trimming the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts typically involve central processing unit, RAM memory, bandwidth and web server disk drive space quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.
In case your website is more resource-absorbing, you should opt for 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 enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU shares are allocated to each individual virtual private web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that utilize the resources of the physical server, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in most situations it is not a problem. Should the resources of the Virtual Private Server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to move to a dedicated web server.
The dedicated hosting is a physical machine that you lease, which is used just by you for your own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you acquire root-level access, can choose a hardware architecture in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disk drives. 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 revise the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.
Pick your hosting solutions provider
If you have a vision of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a loose idea that has not completely evolved yet, your first step towards the creation of your site should be to select a hosting solutions provider. The most relevant step to take is to discover a web host that provides a big variety of website hosting services so that you do not have to switch providers in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to upgrade to a virtual private web hosting server solution or a dedicated hosting server solution. We, for instance, provide affordable shared website hosting plans, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS hosting servers, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own web hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting web server plans. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced virtual hosting servers and dedicated server plans include a charge-free domain name reseller account and billing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24x7x365 client support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, of course, find other web hosting service providers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading additional web hosting reviews. The most intelligent choice, though, is a web host that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have servers in the United States of America, in England and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain extensions for registration.