How Does Shared Hosting Work?

If you wish to create a website and render it visible to the whole world, it must be located on a web hosting server. The name of this service is shared hosting.

Host your website at home or elsewhere

You could host your website on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to a mate of yours, and so on. If it is a site for testing purposes, there would be no real reason for you to find a more advanced web hosting solution than that. If you want to develop an actual web site, though, which will be accessible to multiple viewers and you wish to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a web server for your website?

When you have a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical server has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Typing the IP of the machine in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and quickest 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. Therefore, to create your site, you need your own personal domain name and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your website yourself

If you are an IT expert and understand how to work with a web server, you can have a server of your very own and host your website on it. This will enable you to have complete authority over the hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The disadvantage, however, is that you will need to guarantee the visibility of your website and to handle all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are utilizing a licensed Operating System, you will also have to pay for the license, which is usually more high-priced if bought for a whole web hosting server.

Using a web hosting accounts provider

If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the best step to take is to open an account with a web hosting packages provider. These are companies that offer customers powerful web hosting servers with different hardware configurations in exchange for a given fee. The hosting servers are situated in data center facilities with special cooling and backup power systems to ensure constant network connectivity.

Kinds of web hosting services

The web is a wide ocean and there are a lot of corporations offering various hosting services to the plethora of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based web sites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what hosting type matches your needs?

If you own a small or mid-sized web page that has several hundred guests max, you could safely utilize a shared hosting solution. Shared web hosting suggests that multiple shared hosting user accounts and websites are hosted on one and the same server, thus trimming the price of the web hosting service. Shared accounts ordinarily have CPU, RAM, traffic and server disk storage space quotas to guarantee that the sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not interfere with each other and do not use more resources than they are allocated.

In case 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 is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It offers root privileges, which enables you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be inconceivable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and central processing unit portions are assigned to each single virtual private web server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers apart from yours that utilize the resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in most circumstances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the private virtual web hosting server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously 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. No one else shares its system resources and you obtain full root access, can select the hardware in advance, add updates later on and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mainly at the OS level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can update the kernel of the Operating System (typically Linux-based) too.

Find your hosting solutions provider

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to be composed of, or if you have only a loose idea that has not fully evolved yet, your initial step towards the creation of your website should be to select a web hosting services provider. The wisest step to take is to discover a hosting plans provider that supplies a broad range of website hosting services so that you do not need to change hosting service providers in case you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and need to switch to a virtual private web hosting server or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, supply budget-priced shared web hosting plans, modestly priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based VPS web server hosting packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer cost-free presents - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more advanced VPS plans and dedicated web servers come with a charge-free domain name reseller account and billing software should you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Add the excellent 24-7 support service and you have all you would usually require. You could, without a doubt, find other hosting firms depending on what precisely you are looking for, by carrying out an online survey or by reading different web hosting reviews. The smartest choice, though, is a hosting accounts provider that is also a domain name registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have servers in North America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer loads of domain extensions for registration.