What Actually is Shared Hosting

If you would like to set up a website and render it accessible to the whole world, it must be located on a web hosting server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own personal computer at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more stable web hosting service than that. If you desire to establish an actual website, though, which will be visible to lots of people and you desire to make it reliable, you will also require a stable server on which you will host it.

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

When you have a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the IP of the server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and easiest way to open a website. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you are in need of one for your site. Therefore, to establish your site, you need a domain name of your own and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT expert and know how to deal with a hosting server, you can have a web hosting server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have full control over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The downside, though, is that you will have to guarantee the accessibility of your website and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to pay for the license, which is usually more high-priced if purchased for a whole physical server.

Using a hosting services provider

If you don't want to carry out server maintenance duties, the most logical step to take is to open an account with a web hosting vendor. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The servers are situated in data centers with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure uninterrupted Internet access.

Types of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a vast sea and there are a multitude of firms providing different hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The web hosting services range from free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web pages, to high-priced dedicated hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of web hosting fits your needs?

If you possess a small or average-size web page that has a few hundred guests max, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting implies that a lot of shared web hosting user accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the same web server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts typically involve CPU, RAM, traffic and web content storage space quotas to make certain that the web sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

If your website is more resource-demanding, you should choose a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root-level access, which enables you to make server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable 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 individual virtual private hosting server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that share the system resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in most instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the VPS server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to move to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated hosting is a physical server that you rent, which is used just by you for your own website needs. No one else uses its resources and you gain root access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add upgrades later on and install RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS 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 web hosting solutions provider

If you know what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a loose plan that has not fully matured yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to find a web hosting plans provider. The best solution is to discover a hosting plans provider that distributes an immense range of web hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap web hosts if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to move to a private virtual web server or a dedicated web server solution. We, for example, distribute discounted shared website hosting plans, budget-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server web hosting packages, semi-dedicated hosting servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server plans. We also offer cost-free extras - the shared hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server plans and dedicated web servers come with a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the superb 24/7/365 client support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, certainly, discover other web hosting providers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by examining different online hosting reviews. The smartest choice, however, is a web hosting supplier that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites met by us. We have servers in America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain extensions for registration.