Personal Web Hosting

Website hosting can be used for a number of purposes: if you are a business, then you may use website hosting to host your business website, but if you are an individual you can use website hosting to host your own personal website and other websites that you may want hosted in the public domain. Personal website hosting allows you to host your website on the internet, as well as utilize other services for your domain such as email and DNS so you have full control over your website and domain. You can also utilize the features of the control panel that you are given access to, for example you could use the included file manager to upload files from your home computer so that you can access them through the control panel on any internet connected computer.

Personal web hosting can be sold as any type of web hosting, i.e. a personal web hosting account could be classed as a shared hosting package, reseller hosting, VPS hosting or dedicated server web hosting account; however, personal web hosting is normally classed as shared web hosting mainly due to the low cost of a personal web hosting account and the features that are provided. A very basic personal web hosting account should allow the hosting of at least one domain and should allow you to create your own email accounts for the domain that you are hosting; control panel access should also be provided to allow you to manage your account with ease.

A basic personal web hosting account will most likely be based on a Linux distribution, meaning that in most cases you will be provided with access to an installation of the cPanel control panel to allow you to manage your personal web hosting account. If in the odd case you do have a personal web hosting account based on a Microsoft Windows server, you will be provided with access to an installation of the Plesk control panel to allow you to manage your personal web hosting account with ease. Many web hosts provide control panels for most types of web hosting account since it allows them to manage the server and the clients that the server contains with ease, and allows you to manage your account easily.

Personal web hosting on a Linux based server will allow you to upload PHP web pages for use with a MySQL database, and in some cases you may also be allowed to run pages that you have written in the Java or Perl languages. A basic Windows personal web hosting account should allow you to upload and host web pages that you have created in either classic ASP or ASP.NET for use with a Microsoft SQL Server database backend when hosted. PHP and MySQL can also be run on Windows web hosting packages, although most web hosting providers don’t allow it for personal web hosting since the solutions are only designed for very based usage and hosting.

You don’t have to use personal web hosting to host your own website at all. Just as long as you have your own domain fixed to your hosting account, you can just use it as an email hosting account and send and receive email using your personal web hosting account and email accounts that you have created yourself through the control panel that you should have access to. If you wanted, you could just use your personal web hosting as a giant backup account and backup the contents of your local computer to it, so that if your computer’s hard drive fails you can easily retrieve all your backed up data from your personal web hosting account.

If you want to host more than one website under your web hosting account, or want to host a website that will receive a considerable amount of traffic then you may want to consider a higher end web hosting package such as a high specification shared hosting package of reseller website hosting. Personal web hosting is only really made for the hosting of basic websites whose owners don’t expect to receive much traffic. The main purpose of personal hosting really is just as a storage account, since in most cases only low amounts of bandwidth and disk space are supplied with a personal web hosting account.

Personal web hosting accounts are usually hosted on low specification servers along with many other shared website hosting accounts, since people aren’t normally paying much for them meaning that your web host may struggle to make a profit in this area. This means that you shouldn’t expect personal web hosting accounts to be too reliable in terms of uptime or speed.