How Shared Web Hosting Works
If you desire to set up a site and make it available for the whole world to see, it needs to be located on a web hosting server. This service is called is shared web hosting.
Host your website at home or in another place
You could host your web site on your own PC at your house or at your workplace, on a personal computer which belongs to a chum of yours, etc. If it is a website for experimenting purposes, there would be no real reason for you to look for a more dependable hosting solution than that. If you desire to build an actual web site, though, which will be accessible to lots of visitors and you want to make it reliable, you will also require a stable web server on which you will host it.
Why do you need a server for your website?
When you own a web site, it is hosted on a physical machine. That physical machine has its own physical address called IP address. Typing the IP of the physical server in your web browser's address bar, however, is not the best and most suitable means to access a web site. That is how and why domain names came into being and why you need one for your web site. So, to set up your website, you need your own domain name and a web hosting server to host your website on.
Hosting your web site yourself
If you are an IT specialist and understand how to cope with a server, you can have a web hosting server of your own and host your site on it. This will allow you to exercise complete authority over the web server, to implement server configuration changes and to install software updates yourself rather than having to rely on the data center staff. The weakness, however, is that you will have to ensure the accessibility of your site and to handle all server maintenance procedures yourself. If you are using a licensed OS, you will also have to invest cash in the license, which is typically more costly if bought for a whole server.
Using a web hosting provider
If you don't want to deal with server maintenance tasks, the best step to take is to sign up for an account with a web hosting services provider. These are companies that offer clients powerful hosting servers with various hardware configurations for a given fee. The hosting servers are physically located in data centers with special cooling and backup power supply systems to guarantee uninterrupted service uptime.
Varieties of web hosting services
The World Wide Web is a broad sea and there are lots of hosting suppliers providing various hosting services to the myriad of website owners out there. The hosting services vary from cost-free hosting services, where you can host simple, HTML-based websites, to high-priced dedicated server web hosting services that can drain your funds. So, what hosting type fits your requirements?
If you run a small or medium-sized site that has several hundred visitors tops, you could safely make use of a shared web hosting solution. Shared hosting signifies that many web hosting clients and sites are accommodated on one and the very same hosting server, thus lowering the price of the service. Shared hosting accounts commonly involve CPU, RAM, web traffic and hosting server hard drive space quotas to ensure that the websites accommodated on the hosting server do not meddle with each other and do not use more resources than they are apportioned.
In case your website is bigger, you should pick a VPS web hosting solution, which is the middle ground between the shared hosting solution and the dedicated servers web hosting solution. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It gives you full root-level access, which permits you to implement server configuration modifications - something that would be unthinkable on a shared server. The virtual private servers also offer burstable RAM options. Separate RAM and CPU portions are allotted to each individual virtual web server, without anyone else using them. Typically there are other virtual private servers beside yours that utilize the system resources of the physical machine, which could sometimes influence the overall performance, but in the majority of instances it is not a problem. Should the system resources of the private virtual web server, though, be inadequate for your needs, it is clearly time to migrate to a dedicated web hosting server.
The dedicated server web hosting is a server that you hire, which is used just by you for your very own website needs. No one else uses its system resources and you are bestowed with full root-level access, can choose a hardware configuration in advance, add updates at a later time and install RAM or disk drives. Unlike with the virtual private servers where virtualization is mostly at the OS level and all containers share a single kernel, with a dedicated server you can modify the kernel of the Operating System (usually Linux-based) too.
Pick your hosting packages provider
If you have an idea of what your website is going to be composed of, or if you have just a loose plan that has not fully matured yet, your first step towards the creation of your site should be to pick a hosting services provider. The wisest step to take is to discover a web hosting services provider that provides an immense range of hosting services so that you do not need to swap web hosts in case you first use a shared website hosting solution and then outgrow the shared hosting resources and need to migrate to a virtual server web hosting solution or a dedicated hosting web server solution. We, for instance, provide affordably priced shared website hosting packages, budget-priced OpenVZ and Virtuozzo-based virtual server hosting packages, semi-dedicated web hosting servers with their own hosting Control Panel interface and even dedicated web hosting server packages. We also offer free-of-cost extras - the shared website hosting affordable domain if they are paid for on a yearly basis, the more powerful Virtual Private Servers and dedicated web server plans include a free-of-cost domain reseller account and invoicing software in case you decide to utilize them for reselling purposes. Throw in the first-class 24x7 technical support service and you have all you would typically require. You could, without a doubt, find other web hosting providers depending on what precisely you are searching for, by conducting an online search or by reading additional hosting reviews. The wisest option, though, is a hosting provider that is also a domain registrar and has hosting servers in more than one country - both prerequisites met by us. We have web hosting servers in America, in Great Britain and in Australia, and offer a lot of domain name extensions for registration.
| Business | Corporate | Enterprise | Starter |
| Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage |
| Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth |
| 5 websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | 1 website hosted |
| 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial |
| £3.38 / month | £7.47 / month | £10.77 / month | £2.59 / month |