So, what is hosting?

Hosting origins from the word "host" which has different meanings that are familiar to you. Hosting means providing place for your website on the web hosting company's servers and makes it viewable in the Internet and floating it.

Why can you once need hosting?

Imagine that you have created a website and now you are wondering how your friends and acquaintances can see it. You place it in your personal computer, but then you come to know that it's dangerous for your computer's safety and needs permanent Internet connection. So it causes a lot of inconveniences for you. To avoid them there is web site hosting.

There are different kinds of web site hosting. Let's have a good look at them:

Shared or virtual hosting
Dedicated hosting/ server, Co-location
VDS/VPS ¨CVirtual Dedicated Server/Virtual Private Server
Before choosing some type of web hosting it's necessary to consider the way you are going to use it.

Free Shared hosting

If you want to host some non-profit-making or your personal web site it'd be more profitable to use basic shared hosting for no fee. This type of web site hosting is a rather logical choice if you are a junior in web site building or if you want to try some new idea and don't want to pay. But of course you don't have to suppose it to grant your site the best conditions, such as proper bandwidth and disk space.

Some other features can also be limited, I mean MySQL, PHP support. It often also provides poor web statistics.

Paid Shared hosting

Almost all small businesses, intermediate and large professional sites use shared hosting, ¡®cause they don't need the whole server's space and besides the whole server costs much. With shared/virtual hosting such necessary features, as multiply e-mail, MySQl, PHP, are supported. The main disadvantage is decrease of your site's security.

Dedicated hosting /Server

This type of hosting is the best choice for those, who need much storage and bandwidth, and are good in server administration. You'll be able to use all necessary software, but if you don't have enough knowledge to administrate your server it will be a little bit difficult for you.

Co-location

It's a sub type of dedicated hosting and can be compared with your own house which was built specially for you, with your favorite furniture and all. It's built on your hoster's (ISP) ground. This service is implied to fulfill only your tasks and is designed for your needs alone. And it's cost is correspondingly high.

VDS/ VPS

Virtual private server is a type of web site hosting that is based on dividing a physical server into several virtual ones. It costs less though gives same possibilities as Dedicated server. Now, when we've examined different types of hosting services, you can decide which type of hosting is the most suitable for you.