What Exactly is Shared Hosting?

If you would like to create a site and make it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your website on your own computer at home or at work, on a personal computer which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more powerful hosting solution than that. If you wish to establish an actual website, however, which will be accessible to lots of individuals and you would like to make it dependable, you will also need a stable web server on which you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your website?

When you own a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called IP address. Writing the IP address of the machine in your browser, though, is not the best and quickest way to visit a web site. That is how and why domains appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. Therefore, to set up your site, you need your own domain and a web server to host your site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an IT expert and understand how to take care of a server, you can have a server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have complete control over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter staff. The disadvantage, though, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to spend money on the license, which typically costs more if bought for a whole web server.

Using a web hosting services provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the wisest step to take is to register an account with a web hosting provider. These are firms that offer customers powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The servers are situated in data center facilities with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure uninterrupted network connectivity.

Kinds of web hosting services

The Internet is a bottomless ocean and there are a plethora of web hosting providers offering different hosting services to the multitude of web site owners out there. The web hosting services range from cost-free web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web pages, to costly dedicated hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what type of web hosting corresponds to your demands?

If you run a small or medium-size web site that has several hundred visitors max, you could safely utilize a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that lots of hosting accounts and websites are hosted on the very same server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts ordinarily involve CPU, RAM memory, traffic and web server disk space usage quotas to make sure that the web sites accommodated on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

If your web site is more popular, you should choose a virtual private servers 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 offers root-level access, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU shares are assigned to each single virtual private web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers apart from your own that share the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the VPS, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to get a dedicated web server.

The dedicated servers is a server that you rent, which is utilized solely by you for your own personal web site needs. No one else uses its resources and you are bestowed with root privileges, can choose the hardware in advance, implement updates later on and add RAM or hard 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 web server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Select your hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your site is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague idea that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your website should be to select a web host. The most reasonable step to take is to discover a web hosting services provider that delivers a wide variety of hosting solutions so that you do not have to switch providers in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to migrate to a VPS web hosting server or a dedicated hosting server. We, for instance, distribute cheap shared website hosting packages, low-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS hosting server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer cost-free bonuses - the shared hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful virtual private web servers and dedicated web server packages come with a cost-free domain reseller account and billing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24x7 customer service and you have all you would typically require. You could, certainly, discover other hosting suppliers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by checking different web hosting reviews. The most reasonable choice, however, is a hosting packages provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have hosting servers in North America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer multiple domain extensions for registration.