Hosting Plans Definition

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

Host your website at home or in another place

You could host your web site on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a PC which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to search for a more advanced website hosting solution than that. If you desire to launch a real website, though, which will be visible to a lot of people and you desire to make it reliable, you will also require a dependable server on which you will host it.

Why do you need a server for your site?

When you own a site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the machine in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and simplest way to reach a website. That is how and why domains came into existence and why you are in need of one for your site. So, to establish your website, you require your own domain name and a hosting server to host your website on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an IT expert and understand how to take care of a web server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will enable you to have complete authority over the physical server, to implement server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The negative side, however, is that you will need to guarantee the visibility of your site and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are availing of a licensed Operating System, you will also need to invest money in the license, which normally costs more if purchased for a whole physical server.

Using a hosting supplier

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance duties, the best solution is to register an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The hosting servers are housed in datacenters with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to guarantee uninterrupted service uptime.

Kinds of web hosting services

The web is an immense sea and there are a plethora of hosting firms offering different hosting services to the plethora of website possessors out there. The web hosting services vary from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what type of web hosting suits your requirements?

If you have a small or average-sized website that has several hundred viewers max, you could safely resort to a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that plenty of web hosting clients and web sites are hosted on one and the same web hosting server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts commonly involve central processing unit, memory, traffic and web server disk storage space quotas to ensure that the web sites accommodated on the server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are assigned.

If your website is more resource-absorbing, you should pick a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It offers full root access, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit portions are allocated to each single private virtual server, without anyone else utilizing them. Usually there are other VPSs beside yours that utilize the system resources of the physical server, which could at times influence the overall performance, but in the majority of situations it's of no concern. Should the resources of the VPS server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is clearly time to obtain a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a server that you hire, which is utilized exclusively by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else shares its resources and you receive full server root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disk drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can update the kernel of the OS (typically Linux-based) as well.

Select your web hosting vendor

If you have an idea of what your website is going to consist of, or if you have only a loose plan that has not fully evolved yet, your very first move towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a hosting solutions provider. The smartest step to take is to find a web hosting provider that supplies a large array of web hosting services so that you do not need to switch service providers in case you first use a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and have to shift to a virtual server solution or a dedicated web server solution. We, for instance, distribute cheap shared website hosting packages, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual web servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated web 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 advanced virtual web server hosting packages and dedicated web hosting servers offer a free-of-cost domain reseller account and billing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the great 24x7x365 technical support service and you have all you would normally require. You could, doubtlessly, discover other hosting firms depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online survey or by checking different web hosting reviews. The most relevant option, though, is a web hosting services provider that is also a domain name registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have hosting servers in the States, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain extensions for registration.