Hosting: virtual and dedicated

When you have registered your own domain name and have built your website you need to show it to the people, to put your pages into public access. As a matter of fact you need a web space - a computer that is accessible from the internet.   Of course your own home or office desktop or even laptop could be such computer but setting up web server by yourself isn't easy. Also your home DSL connection is much slower than multiple broadband connections of hosting company.   So the logical choice is to rent some web space from the company whose primary business is to lease web servers that are permanently connected to the internet via multiple high speed broadband connections and constantly supervised by skilled personnel.

When it comes to choose hosting package there are two major options:

virtual (or shared) hosting or dedicated (or managed) hosting. The former means that you will get a part of the web server's disk space along with other customers. Your websites will be virtually sharing one computer with other's but other customers won't be able to access your private areas like website setting etc. and you won't be able to access their's. The latter (dedicated) means that you will get the whole web server for yourself and nobody else will use it to host his websites.

Virtual hosting is much cheaper and suite well for small websites like personal homepage, small business or not big community. You can choose among several offers that differs by amount of disk space, traffic included (amount of data that your visitors could download) and some other options.

If you believe that your website will be extremely popular or you need to keep gigabytes of data you should go for dedicated hosting. It's more expensive than virtual but offers much more flexibility: you can personally choose hardware (processors, amount of RAM and disk space) and software, even operating system!