How Does Shared Hosting Operate?

If you would like to set up a web site and make it visible to the whole world, it needs to be located on a web server. This service is called is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your website on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a friend of yours, etc. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more reliable hosting solution than that. If you want to develop a real web site, however, which will be accessible to a lot of visitors and you want to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable server where you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your site?

When you own a web site, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the machine in your browser, though, is not the best and quickest method to open a web site. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your site. Hence, to establish your website, you require your own personal domain name and a hosting server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an IT professional and know how to administer a web hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your website on it. This will enable you to exert full control over the machine, to make server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The negative side, however, is that you will have to ensure the accessibility of your website and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also need to spend cash on the license, which is usually more high-priced if bought for a whole web hosting server.

Using a hosting distributor

If you don't want to handle server maintenance tasks, the best thing to do is sign up for an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given tax. The hosting servers are stored in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee continuous Internet access.

Types of web hosting services

The World Wide Web is a deep sea and there are lots of hosting providers offering various hosting services to the multitude of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can suck your finances dry. So, what type of web hosting fits your requirements?

If you run a small or mid-size website that has a few hundred visitors tops, you could safely resort to a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting suggests that multiple user accounts and web sites are accommodated on the same web server, thus curtailing the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts ordinarily involve CPU, RAM, traffic and hosting server storage space quotas to make certain that the websites accommodated on the web hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not utilize more resources than they are allocated.

If your website is more resource-absorbing, 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 stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you root privileges, which allows you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web hosting server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are allocated to each individual virtual server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other virtual private servers beside yours that use the resources of the physical machine, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in most instances it is not a problem. Should the resources of the virtual web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is plainly time to obtain a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical server that you hire, which is used only by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else shares its system resources and you are granted complete root-level access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, implement updates at a later time and add RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) as well.

Select your hosting supplier

If you have a notion of what your website is going to consist of, or if you have only a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a web hosting packages provider. The most reasonable step to take is to find a web hosting packages provider that distributes a large selection of hosting solutions so that you do not need to switch hosts if you first avail of a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to migrate to a virtual private web server solution or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for instance, offer discounted shared hosting packages, inexpensive OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web server hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer free-of-cost bonuses - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Server hosting plans and dedicated web hosting server plans offer a charge-free domain reseller account and invoicing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the topflight round-the-clock customer support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, undoubtedly, discover other hosting providers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by reading different hosting reviews online. The most intelligent choice, however, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have web hosting servers in the United States, in Britain and in Australia, and offer a myriad of domain extensions for registration.