How Shared Web Hosting Works

If you want to create a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is shared web hosting.

Host your site at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own computer at your house or at your workplace, on a computer which belongs to a pal of yours, and so on. If it is a website for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more advanced web hosting solution than that. If you want to build an actual website, however, which will be visible to plenty of people and you desire to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable server where you will host it.

Why do you require 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 called Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP of the machine in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and quickest way to open a web site. That is how and why domain names appeared and why you are in need of one for your web site. So, to launch your site, you need a domain of your own and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT professional and know how to administer a web hosting server, you can have a web server of your very own and host your website on it. This will allow you to exert full control over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center personnel. The weakness, however, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your website and to deal with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which usually costs more if bought for a whole server.

Using a web host

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance duties, the best step to take is to open an account with a web hosting plans provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations for a given tax. The hosting servers are situated in data centers with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant network uptime.

Kinds of hosting services

The web is an endless ocean and there are plenty of web hosting vendors providing different hosting services to the plethora of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based sites, to high-priced dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your resources dry. So, what hosting type meets your needs?

If you possess a small or medium-size site that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that multiple hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on one and the same hosting server, thus slashing the price of the service. Shared accounts ordinarily have central processing unit, memory, traffic and hosting server hard disk storage space quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the server do not interfere with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your site is more resource-consuming, you should choose a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared web hosting solution and the dedicated servers web hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers root privileges, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable 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 apart from yours that use the resources of the physical server, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in most situations it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the private virtual web hosting server, though, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to switch to a dedicated web server.

The dedicated server web hosting is a server that you rent, which is used solely by you for your very own web site needs. No one else shares its resources and you obtain full server root privileges, can select a hardware architecture in advance, apply updates later on and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) too.

Pick your web hosting provider

If you have a notion of what your site is going to consist of, or if you have only a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your site should be to find a hosting provider. The most logical step to take is to discover a web hosting services provider that supplies a large range of web hosting solutions so that you do not have to swap web hosting service providers in case you first avail of a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual private web hosting server solution or a dedicated server. We, for instance, distribute discounted shared website hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private hosting servers, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web hosting servers. We also offer free-of-charge presents - the shared web hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced private virtual web servers and dedicated server web hosting plans include a cost-free domain reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the first-rate 24x7 customer service and you have all you would typically require. You could, doubtlessly, find other hosting suppliers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by reading additional online hosting reviews. The best choice, however, is a web hosting packages provider that is also a domain name registrar and has servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have web hosting servers in North America, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a plethora of domain name extensions for registration.