Shared Hosting Description

If you would like to build a web site and make it available for the whole world to see, it needs 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 web site on your own personal PC at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a comrade of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more powerful website hosting service than that. If you wish to establish an actual website, however, which will be accessible to lots of individuals and you want to make it dependable, you will also require a reliable server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your site?

When you own a web site, it is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP address of the physical server in your web browser, though, is not the best and easiest method to access a website. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your web site. Thus, to establish your website, you require a domain name of your own and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an IT specialist and know how to cope with a web server, you can have a server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will permit you to exercise complete control over the server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The downside, though, is that you will have to ensure the accessibility of your web site and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend money on the license, which typically costs more if bought for a whole web server.

Using a web hosting provider

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to register an account with a web hosting vendor. These are firms that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The web servers are kept in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure continuous service uptime.

Varieties of hosting services

The web is a bottomless ocean and there are plenty of companies providing different hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated server hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what type of hosting matches your needs?

If you have a small or medium-size web site that has a few hundred viewers tops, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting means that a lot of users and websites are accommodated on one and the same server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts typically have central processing unit, memory, bandwidth and web space quotas to make certain that the web sites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are apportioned.

If your web site is larger, 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 root access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - 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 virtual server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that make use of the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to consider a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you hire, which is used exclusively by you for your very own personal web site needs. No one else uses its resources and you have complete server root access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, implement updates later on and install RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting services provider

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to comprise, or if you have just a vague idea that has not completely matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your site should be to discover a web hosting accounts provider. The best step to take is to discover a hosting distributor that distributes an extensive assortment of hosting services so that you do not need to change web hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a VPS web hosting solution or a dedicated web server solution. We, for example, offer discounted shared website hosting packages, discounted OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web hosting server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server packages. We also offer free presents - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced VPS packages and dedicated hosting servers include a charge-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the top-notch 24/7/365 support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, certainly, find other hosting vendors depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online survey or by checking additional hosting reviews online. The most relevant choice, though, is a hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the States, in the UK and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.