What is Shared Hosting?

If you desire to create a website and make it visible to the whole world, it has to be located on a hosting server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more reliable web hosting solution than that. If you want to create a real website, though, which will be visible to lots of people and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a reliable web server where you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your website?

When you own a website, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and easiest way to access a website. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. Therefore, to launch your web site, you need a domain name of your own and a server to host your website on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an Information Technology professional and understand how to work with a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to have complete control over the web server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The disadvantage, however, is that you will have to guarantee the uptime of your site and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to invest cash in the license, which is typically more expensive if purchased for an entire web server.

Using a hosting solutions provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the most reasonable step to take is to open an account with a web hosting company. These are firms that offer customers powerful web servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The web hosting servers are kept in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power supply systems to guarantee uninterrupted network connectivity.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is an endless ocean and there are a myriad of providers delivering various hosting services to the multitude of website possessors out there. The hosting services range from free-of-cost web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated web server hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what hosting type fits your needs?

If you have a small or mid-sized web page that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that a lot of shared web hosting users and websites are hosted on the very same server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts normally have CPU, RAM memory, web traffic and web hosting space quotas to guarantee that the sites hosted on the web server do not interfere with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allotted.

In case your website is more popular, you should pick a virtual private servers hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root access, which allows you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are allotted to each individual VPS, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside 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 situations it is not a problem. Should the resources of the private virtual hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to shift to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you hire, which is used just by you for your own personal web site needs. No one else shares its system resources and you acquire full root-level access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, apply updates at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Pick your hosting distributor

If you know what your website is going to contain, or if you have just a loose idea that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to discover a web hosting plans provider. The most logical step to take is to discover a hosting packages provider that distributes an enormous variety of web hosting solutions so that you do not need to change providers in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to switch to a Virtual Private Server hosting solution or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for example, furnish cheap shared web hosting packages, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server web hosting plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated hosting plans. We also offer free-of-cost bounties - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful VPS web hosting packages and dedicated web server hosting plans offer a cost-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great 24x7x365 technical support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, doubtlessly, discover other web hosting providers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by checking different web hosting reviews. The smartest option, though, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have web servers in the United States of America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain name extensions for registration.