The Nature of Web Hosting

If you would like to launch a site and render it accessible to the whole world, it must be located on a server. This service is known as website hosting.

Host your web site at home or elsewhere

You could host your site on your own PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to discover a more advanced web site hosting solution than that. If you wish to build an actual web site, however, which will be accessible to multiple persons and you would like to make it dependable, you will also require a stable hosting server where you will host it.


Why do you require a server for your website?

When you have a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP address of the machine in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most suitable means to pay a visit to a website. That is how and why domains appeared and why you need one for your web site. So, to launch your site, you require your own domain and a web server to host your web site on.

Hosting your web site on your own

If you are an Information Technology specialist and know how to administer a web hosting server, you can have a web server of your own and host your site on it. This will enable you to have full control over the hosting server, to implement server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The downside, however, is that you will need to guarantee the accessibility of you site and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is typically more high-priced if bought for an entire web hosting server.

Using a web hosting supplier
If you don't want to perform server maintenance procedures, the best solution is to open an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful servers with different hardware configurations for a given fee. The hosting servers are kept in datacenter facilities with special cooling and emergency power systems to guarantee constant Internet access.

Types of web hosting services
The Internet is a wide sea and there are plenty of hosting suppliers offering various web hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The hosting services vary from free hosting services, where you can host basic, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated web hosting services that can drain your monthly budget. So, what type of hosting suits your demands?

If you have a small or medium-sized site that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting means that lots of shared web hosting customers and sites are hosted on the very same server, thus trimming the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts commonly have central processing unit, RAM, traffic and web hosting server disk drive space quotas to make sure that the web sites hosted on the server do not meddle with each other and do not use more system resources than they are allotted.

In case your website is more frequently visited, you should opt for a VPS web server hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated web server hosting solution. VPS is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root privileges, which enables you to make server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared hosting web server. The private virtual servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are assigned to each single virtual server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other Virtual Private Servers beside yours that make use of the 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 system resources of the virtual private web hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is plainly time to order a dedicated hosting web server.

The dedicated server is a physical server that you rent, which is utilized solely by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you acquire full root access, can select the hardware in advance, apply updates at a later time and add RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the private virtual servers where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your web hosting distributor

If you have a notion of what your site is going to be composed of, or if you have only a vague plan that has not completely evolved yet, your very first step towards the creation of your website should be to discover a web hosting distributor. The wisest step to take is to find a web hosting solutions provider that distributes a broad array of website hosting services so that you do not need to change web hosting service providers in case you first use a shared web hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a virtual private web hosting server solution or a dedicated server solution. My own personal favorite is NTChosting, which furnishes discounted shared website hosting packages, cut-rate OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based private virtual server packages, semi-dedicated hosting server plans with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web server hosting plans. I am very pleased with all their offers, since they all offer charge-free gifts - the shared web site hosting plans come with a free-of-charge domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced VPS hosting plans and dedicated web server plans include a free-of-cost domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the topflight 24/7/365 customer service and you have all you would typically require. You could, undoubtedly, find other hosting providers depending on what exactly you are searching for, by carrying out an online search or by reading additional web hosting reviews. The smartest option, though, is a web hosting distributor that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by NTChosting, which has servers in America, in Great Britain, in Scandinavia and in Australia, and offers numerous domain extensions for registration.

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