Shared Hosting Definition

If you would like to build a website and make it accessible to the whole world, it has 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 computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a pal of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more reliable hosting solution than that. If you want to build a real web site, though, which will be accessible to a lot of individuals and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable server where you will host it.

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

When you have a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP address of the server in your browser, however, is not the best and most appropriate method to open a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. Therefore, to create your web site, you need a domain of your own and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology pro and know how to work with a web hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exert full authority over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The drawback, though, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your website and to deal with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend cash on the license, which is normally more high-priced if purchased for a whole web hosting server.

Using a web hosting services provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance duties, the most relevant step to take is to register an account with a web hosting services provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful web servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The hosting servers are located in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power systems to ensure continuous Internet connectivity.

Kinds of hosting services

The web is an immense ocean and there are multiple corporations offering different hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web sites, to costly dedicated hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what type of web hosting fits your needs?

If you have a small or average-size site that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that many shared hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on the same server, thus decreasing the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts commonly involve CPU, RAM memory, web traffic and data storage space usage quotas to guarantee that the websites hosted on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are apportioned.

If your web site is more resource-requiring, 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 gives you root privileges, which allows you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allocated to each single virtual private web server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that utilize the resources of the physical server, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in most cases it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the virtual web hosting server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to get a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is utilized solely by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you gain root access, can choose the hardware in advance, add updates later on and install RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can revise the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting plans provider

If you have a notion of what your website is going to include, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your site should be to discover a web hosting solutions provider. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a web hosting accounts provider that provides a vast variety of hosting services so that you do not need to switch web hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to switch to a virtual hosting server or a dedicated web server. We, for instance, provide moderately priced shared website hosting packages, cheap OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web servers, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server web hosting plans. We also offer charge-free extras - the shared website hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful virtual server hosting plans and dedicated server web hosting packages offer a charge-free domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-rate 24x7 customer support service and you have all you would typically need. You could, of course, find other web hosting providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by reading different web hosting reviews online. The most intelligent choice, though, is a hosting vendor that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States of America, in England and in Australia, and offer loads of domain name extensions for registration.