What Does Shared Hosting Mean?

If you wish to launch a site and render it available for the whole world to see, it must 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 web site on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a computer which belongs to a friend of yours, and so on. If it is a web site for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to seek a more dependable website hosting solution than that. If you want to set up a real website, though, which will be visible to many visitors and you want to make it dependable, you will also need a reliable web server where you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your site?

When you have a web site, it is located on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as Internet Protocol address. Writing the IP of the physical server in your browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most convenient means to reach a website. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you are in need of one for your web site. So, to set up your web site, you require your own domain name and a web server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT pro and understand how to take care of a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will enable you to have full control over the web server, to make server configuration modifications and to apply software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the datacenter personnel. The weakness, however, is that you will need to guarantee the availability of your site and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed OS, you will also have to invest money in the license, which is typically more costly if purchased for an entire hosting server.

Using a hosting vendor

If you don't want to take care of server maintenance duties, the most logical step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting supplier. These are firms that offer clients powerful servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The hosting servers are held in data centers with special cooling and uninterruptible power supply systems to guarantee constant Internet connectivity.

Varieties of hosting services

The World Wide Web is a vast ocean and there are multiple web hosting corporations providing different hosting services to the myriad of website proprietors out there. The web hosting services range from charge-free web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to costly dedicated hosting services that can drain your funds. So, what hosting type meets your requirements?

If you run a small or medium-size web site that has a few hundred guests tops, you could safely avail of a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting means that lots of user accounts and web sites are hosted on one and the same hosting server, thus reducing the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts typically involve central processing unit, RAM, traffic and server disk space quotas to guarantee that the web sites hosted on the web hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allocated.

In case your site is more resource-devouring, you should pick 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 abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root access, which permits you to implement server configuration changes - something that would be unthinkable on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM memory and CPU shares are allocated to each individual virtual private web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside yours that share the resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual web hosting server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to switch to a dedicated hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you hire, which is used only by you for your own personal website needs. No one else shares its resources and you are granted complete root access, can select a hardware configuration in advance, add updates at a later time and install RAM or hard drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated web hosting server you can modify the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) as well.

Choose your web hosting packages provider

If you have an idea of what your web site is going to contain, or if you have just a loose plan that has not completely evolved yet, your first step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting distributor. The most intelligent step to take is to discover a hosting provider that distributes a broad variety of website hosting services so that you do not need to change hosting service providers if you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to migrate to a private virtual hosting server or a dedicated web hosting server. We, for example, supply cut-price shared website hosting plans, moderately priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web server plans, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated web hosting packages. We also offer charge-free presents - the shared web hosting cheap domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced virtual private hosting server packages and dedicated web server hosting packages include a charge-free domain name reseller account and invoicing software in case you wish to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-rate 24x7 tech support service and you have all you would normally need. You could, undoubtedly, find other web hosting distributors depending on what exactly you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by examining additional online web hosting reviews. The most relevant option, however, is a hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has web hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites satisfied by us. We have hosting servers in the United States of America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a plethora of domain name extensions for registration.