Shared Hosting Definition

If you want to set up a site and render it visible to the whole world, it has to be hosted on a web hosting server. The name of this service is shared hosting.

Host your web site at home or in another place

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

Why do you require a server for your site?

When you own a site, it is located on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your browser's address bar, though, is not the best and easiest method to open a website. That is how and why domain names came into existence and why you are in need of one for your site. So, to set up your site, you require a domain of your own and a web server to host your web site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an Information Technology professional and understand how to deal with a web hosting server, you can have a server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exercise complete authority over the physical machine, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center personnel. The disadvantage, though, is that you will have to ensure the uptime of your website and to cope with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also need to invest money in the license, which normally costs more if purchased for an entire server.

Using a web hosting packages provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the best thing to do is open an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful servers with various hardware configurations for a certain fee. The servers are placed in data center facilities with special cooling and UPS systems to ensure continuous network connectivity.

Kinds of web hosting services

The Internet is an immense sea and there are a multitude of hosting providers providing various hosting services to the multitude of web site proprietors out there. The web hosting services vary from charge-free hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can suck your monthly allowance dry. So, what web hosting type fulfills your requirements?

If you own a small or average-sized website that has several hundred guests tops, you could safely use a shared web hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that multiple shared web hosting clients and websites are hosted on one and the very same web server, thus lowering the price of the hosting service. Shared hosting accounts typically have CPU, RAM, traffic and web hosting space usage quotas to ensure that the sites accommodated on the web server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.

If your web site is more frequently visited, you should choose a virtual private servers hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated servers hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It offers full root privileges, which allows you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared hosting web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable memory options. Separate RAM memory and central processing unit shares are assigned to each single virtual private hosting server, without anyone else using them. Usually there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that use the system resources of the physical server, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in the majority of cases it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the VPS server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is apparently time to shift to a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you lease, which is used solely by you for your own personal website needs. No one else uses its system resources and you gain full root privileges, can choose the hardware in advance, apply upgrades later on and install RAM or disk 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 web server you can revise the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your web hosting accounts provider

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have only a loose idea that has not completely matured yet, your first move towards the creation of your web site should be to discover a hosting vendor. The wisest step to take is to find a web hosting company that provides a big selection of hosting solutions so that you do not need to swap hosting providers in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to shift to a VPS web hosting server or a dedicated server solution. We, for example, deliver cheap shared website hosting plans, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS hosting servers, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web server hosting plans. We also offer free-of-cost gifts - the shared website hosting cheap domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced Virtual Private Server web hosting packages and dedicated hosting packages offer a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-rate 24/7/365 customer service and you have all you would normally need. You could, of course, find other web hosting vendors depending on what precisely you are searching for, by carrying out an online survey or by checking different online web hosting reviews. The best option, however, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both requirements satisfied by us. We have web servers in the United States, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer a plethora of domain extensions for registration.