How Does Shared Hosting Work?

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

Host your web site at home or somewhere else

You could host your website on your own personal PC at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, and so on. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more dependable web hosting solution than that. If you would like to build an actual website, though, which will be reachable by plenty of people and you desire to make it reliable, you will also require a reliable server where you will host it.

Why do you need a web server for your website?

When you have a site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical server has its own physical address called Internet Protocol address. Writing the Internet Protocol address of the server in your web browser's address bar, though, is not the best and most appropriate method to access a website. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your site. So, to launch your website, you require a domain name of your own and a web hosting server to host your site on.

Hosting your website on your own

If you are an IT professional and understand how to tackle a web hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will permit you to exercise full control over the web hosting server, to implement server configuration changes and to apply software updates yourself instead of relying on the data center staff. The negative side, however, is that you will have to guarantee the uptime of your website and to deal with all server maintenance tasks yourself. If you are making use of a licensed Operating System, you will also have to pay for the license, which usually costs more if bought for a whole web hosting server.

Using a web hosting distributor

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance duties, the most intelligent step to take is to open an account with a web hosting provider. These are firms that offer clients powerful web servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain tax. The hosting servers are physically located in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee constant Internet connection.

Varieties of hosting services

The web is a boundless ocean and there are lots of web hosting suppliers delivering different hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The web hosting services range from free-of-cost hosting services, where you can host plain, HTML-based sites, to expensive dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your resources. So, what web hosting type satisfies your needs?

If you run a small or medium-size site that has several hundred guests max, you could safely use a shared hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that plenty of shared web hosting users and sites are accommodated on the same server, thus trimming the price of the hosting service. Shared accounts commonly include CPU, memory, bandwidth and web hosting storage space quotas to ensure that the 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 site is more resource-consuming, 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 abbreviation of Virtual Private Server. It gives you root access, which permits you to make server configuration changes - something that would be impossible on a shared web server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM memory and CPU portions are assigned to each single VPS web hosting server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other virtual private servers aside from your own that utilize the resources of the physical machine, which could occasionally affect the overall performance, but in most situations it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the private virtual web server, however, be inadequate for your needs, it is obviously time to shift to a dedicated server.

The dedicated servers is a physical machine that you rent, which is used exclusively by you for your very own personal web site needs. Nobody else uses its resources and you have root-level access, can select a hardware architecture in advance, apply upgrades at a later time and install RAM or hard disks. 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) as well.

Find your hosting vendor

If you know what your web site is going to consist of, or if you have only a vague plan that has not fully evolved yet, your initial move towards the creation of your site should be to select a web host. The best solution is to discover a hosting supplier that distributes an extensive array of website hosting solutions so that you do not have to change hosts in case you first make use of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared web hosting resources and have to migrate to a virtual server or a dedicated server solution. We, for instance, distribute cheap shared website hosting packages, cut-price OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual web server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own web hosting Control Panel user interface and even dedicated server web hosting packages. We also offer free-of-charge bonuses - the shared hosting affordable domain name if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more advanced VPS servers and dedicated web server packages offer a cost-free domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to use them for reselling purposes. Add the superb 24-7-365 tech support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, of course, discover other web hosting service providers depending on what precisely you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by examining different online web hosting reviews. The most suitable choice, however, is a hosting distributor that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites fulfilled by us. We have servers in the US, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain extensions for registration.