What Actually is Shared Hosting

If you want to set up a website and render it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be hosted on a web server. The name of this service is shared hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your site on your own PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a chum of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to look for a more powerful website hosting solution than that. If you wish to set up an actual web site, however, which will be visible to lots of persons and you desire to make it dependable, you will also need a dependable server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your web site?

When you have a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the IP address of the machine in your browser, however, is not the best and most appropriate 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. So, to create your web site, you require your own personal domain and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT pro and know how to administer a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will allow you to exercise full control over the machine, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter staff. The drawback, though, is that you will have to ensure the visibility of your website and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are availing of a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which typically costs more if bought for a whole physical machine.

Using a web hosting plans provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance tasks, the best step to take is to register an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The web servers are placed in datacenters with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure constant Internet connection.

Kinds of hosting services

The Internet is a broad ocean and there are lots of service providers offering various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to costly dedicated web hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what web hosting type matches your needs?

If you run a small or medium-size web page that has several hundred visitors max, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that multiple hosting customers and websites are hosted on one and the very same hosting server, thus reducing the price of the service. Shared accounts ordinarily involve central processing unit, RAM memory, bandwidth and web server disk drive space quotas to ensure that the sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are assigned.

If your site is more resource-devouring, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root privileges, which enables you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are allocated to each individual VPS hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from yours that avail of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is clearly time to get a dedicated web hosting server.

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

Select your hosting vendor

If you have an idea of what your website is going to contain, or if you have only a vague plan that has not fully matured yet, your very first move towards the creation of your website should be to find a hosting provider. The best step to take is to find a web hosting corporation that offers a broad selection of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to switch web hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to shift to a private virtual web hosting server solution or a dedicated server solution. We, for instance, provide inexpensive shared web hosting packages, moderately priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server plans, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web server hosting plans. We also offer charge-free bonuses - the shared website hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced VPS web server hosting packages and dedicated server web hosting plans include a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-class round-the-clock support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, certainly, discover other web hosting corporations depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by examining additional hosting reviews online. The most intelligent choice, though, is a web host that is also a domain registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have servers in the USA, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer plenty of domain extensions for registration.