How Does Shared Hosting Work?

If you wish to create a site and make it available for the whole world to see, it must be located on a hosting server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or somewhere else

You could host your web site on your own personal personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a friend of yours, etc. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more powerful web hosting service than that. If you would like to build an actual web site, though, which will be visible to multiple viewers and you want to make it reliable, you will also need a stable web server where you will host it.

Why do you require a hosting server for your website?

When you own a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the physical machine in your browser, though, is not the best and quickest way to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you need one for your site. So, to establish your website, you require a domain name of your own and a web server to host your website on.

Hosting your site yourself

If you are an Information Technology expert and understand how to deal with a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your website on it. This will permit you to exercise full authority over the hosting server, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The drawback, though, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your web site and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to pay for the license, which is normally more costly if bought for an entire web server.

Using a hosting provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the smartest step to take is to open an account with a web hosting supplier. These are companies that offer clients powerful servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The hosting servers are situated in datacenters with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant Internet connectivity.

Types of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a wide ocean and there are lots of web hosting corporations offering different hosting services to the multitude of website possessors out there. The hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what web hosting type meets your requirements?

If you own a small or medium-size web site that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting implies that multiple shared hosting accounts and websites are accommodated on the same server, thus slashing the price of the web hosting service. Shared hosting accounts normally include CPU, RAM memory, traffic and server hard drive storage space usage quotas to make sure that the websites hosted on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are apportioned.

If your site is more resource-requiring, you should consider 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 abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are allocated to each single VPS web server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that avail of the system resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally influence the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it's of no concern. Should the resources of the virtual private web server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to obtain a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a server that you rent, which is used solely by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you have full root privileges, can choose the hardware in advance, implement upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard drives. 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 revise the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Select your web hosting services provider

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your website should be to discover a hosting provider. The best thing to do is discover a web hosting firm that provides a broad range of website hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch web hosting providers in case you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a private virtual web server or a dedicated server solution. We, for example, furnish cut-price shared web hosting plans, affordable OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated server hosting plans. We also offer free-of-charge bonuses - the shared hosting low-cost domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful VPS hosting server plans and dedicated server web hosting plans offer a cost-free domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the great 24/7 tech support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, undoubtedly, find other hosting vendors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different hosting reviews online. The most reasonable choice, though, is a web hosting accounts provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions met by us. We have hosting servers in the US, in Britain and in Australia, and offer numerous domain extensions for registration.