Shared Hosting Definition

If you wish to build a website and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be hosted on a server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your site on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more powerful hosting solution than that. If you would like to establish an actual website, however, which will be visible to a lot of individuals and you wish to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable server where you will host it.

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

When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the IP of the physical server in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and easiest method to visit a web site. That is how and why domains came into being and why you need one for your site. Thus, to launch your website, you need your own domain and a web hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT professional and understand how to administer a server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your site on it. This will allow you to have full authority over the web server, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The weak side, however, is that you will need to ensure the uptime of your web site and to deal with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are availing of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to spend cash on the license, which is normally more costly if purchased for an entire physical machine.

Using a hosting services provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance procedures, the most relevant step to take is to register an account with a web hosting provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The hosting servers are placed in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure uninterrupted website availability.

Types of web hosting services

The Internet is a broad sea and there are multiple companies delivering different hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web pages, to expensive dedicated hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what web hosting type matches your needs?

If you possess a small or medium-sized web site that has a few hundred visitors max, you could safely resort to a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that many shared hosting customers and sites are accommodated on the very same server, thus trimming the price of the hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts typically have CPU, RAM memory, traffic and web server hard disk storage space quotas to ensure that the web sites hosted on the hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allotted.

In case your web site is more frequently visited, you should opt for a virtual private servers hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM 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 system resources of the physical server, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in the majority of circumstances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the VPS hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is obviously time to move to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you rent, which is used just by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you gain root access, can select the hardware in advance, implement updates at a later time and add RAM or hard disks. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) as well.

Pick your web hosting vendor

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to include, or if you have only a vague plan that has not fully evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a web hosting supplier. The best step to take is to find a web hosting packages provider that furnishes an enormous range of hosting solutions so that you do not need to change service providers if you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to switch to a private virtual server or a dedicated hosting server. We, for instance, offer affordable shared hosting plans, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web server hosting plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated server packages. We also offer charge-free gifts - the shared website hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced private virtual web server hosting plans and dedicated web server plans include a charge-free domain reseller account and billing software in case you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Add the first-class round-the-clock technical support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, of course, discover other hosting suppliers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by carrying out an online search or by checking different hosting reviews online. The best option, though, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both requirements fulfilled by us. We have hosting servers in the United States of America, in England and in Australia, and offer numerous domain name extensions for registration.