Hosting Plans Definition

If you would like to set up a site and make it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be hosted on a server. The name of this service is hosting.

Host your site at home or somewhere else

You could host your website on your own personal computer at home or at work, on a PC which belongs to an acquaintance of yours, etc. If it is a web site for testing purposes, there would be no real need for you to seek a more reliable website hosting service than that. If you wish to launch an actual web site, however, which will be visible to numerous viewers and you would like to make it reliable, you will also need a dependable hosting server where you will host it.

Why do you require a server for your web site?

When you own a website, it is hosted on a physical server. That physical machine has its own physical address known also as IP address. Typing the Internet Protocol address of the physical machine in your browser, however, is not the best and most appropriate way to pay a visit to a web site. That is how and why domains came into being and why you are in need of one for your site. Hence, to launch your web site, you need a domain of your own and a server to host your site on.

Hosting your site on your own

If you are an IT expert and understand how to work with a hosting server, you can have a hosting server of your very own and host your web site on it. This will enable you to exert full authority over the web server, to make server configuration modifications and to install software updates yourself instead of relying on the datacenter personnel. The weak side, however, is that you will have to guarantee the availability of your website and to cope with all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to spend money on the license, which is typically more high-priced if purchased for an entire server.

Using a hosting provider

If you don't want to cope with server maintenance procedures, the wisest step to take is to register an account with a web hosting accounts provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful web servers with various hardware configurations in exchange for a certain fee. The hosting servers are housed in datacenter facilities with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee continuous Internet connection.

Varieties of web hosting services

The Internet is a wide ocean and there are a multitude of hosting corporations providing various hosting services to the plethora of web site owners out there. The hosting services vary from free-of-charge web hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to expensive dedicated server hosting services that can drain your monthly allowance. So, what type of web hosting conforms to your needs?

If you own a small or medium-sized web page that has a few hundred viewers max, you could safely avail of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting means that many user accounts and web sites are accommodated on the very same web server, thus decreasing the price of the web hosting service. Shared web hosting accounts ordinarily include CPU, RAM, bandwidth and web hosting server hard disk space usage quotas to guarantee that the web sites accommodated on the web hosting server do not intervene with each other and do not utilize more system resources than they are allotted.

If your website is bigger, you should select a VPS hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated hosting solution. VPS is an acronym for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be inconceivable on a shared hosting server. The VPSs also offer burstable RAM memory options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allocated to each single virtual private web server, without anyone else utilizing them. Typically there are other VPSs apart from your own that make use of the system resources of the physical server, which could at times affect the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it's of no concern. Should the system resources of the virtual private web server, however, be insufficient for your needs, it is apparently time to switch to a dedicated web hosting server.

The dedicated servers is a server that you hire, which is utilized solely by you for your very own web site needs. Nobody else uses its system resources and you have root privileges, can select a hardware configuration in advance, implement upgrades later on and add RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the VPSs where virtualization is mainly at the Operating System level and all virtual containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated hosting web server you can update the kernel of the OS (usually Linux-based) too.

Choose your hosting distributor

If you have a vision of what your web site is going to include, or if you have just a vague idea that has not completely matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your website should be to pick a web hosting provider. The best course of action is to discover a hosting corporation that provides a large selection of hosting solutions so that you do not need to change hosting service providers if you first avail of a shared hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to upgrade to a virtual private hosting server or a dedicated web server hosting solution. We, for instance, distribute budget-priced shared website hosting packages, affordably priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual private web hosting server packages, semi-dedicated servers with their own hosting Control Panel and even dedicated web servers. We also offer free-of-charge bonuses - the shared web hosting low-cost domain name if they are paid for on an annual basis, the more powerful private virtual server plans and dedicated hosting web servers include a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software should you wish to use them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-rate 24/7/365 customer support service and you have all you would usually need. You could, of course, find other hosting service providers depending on what exactly you are looking for, by conducting an online search or by reading different hosting reviews. The most reasonable choice, however, is a web hosting plans provider that is also a domain registrar and has web servers in more than one country - both preconditions satisfied by us. We have servers in North America, in the UK and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain extensions for registration.