If you are new to web hosting, you might be encountering words or technical terms whose definitions are strange to you. Among them could be the words domain, domain name, web host, virtual host, web hosting and server. First and foremost, you should understand that creating a website does not end with producing a well-made site design and coming up with a name for it. You have to register its domain name, and find a reliable web host, that could provide a secure server for your website.

In order for your website to be accessible by others via the Internet, you need to use a server. This is a huge computer or hardware that stores all the information contained in your website. The server has an IP address (a series of decimals) that is represented by an easy to recognize name, called a domain name. This is part of the website URL you place in the address bar and is used to identify your websites location on the Internet.

A virtual domain is a domain hosted by a server that concurrently hosts other virtual domains. In contrast to a domain on a dedicated server, virtual domain shares with other web sites its access to the features of the single server that hosts all of them; thus, virtual domain hosting is also called as shared domain hosting.

The ways that a domain on a dedicated server and a domain on a virtual server are hosted are almost the same. The biggest difference between the two is that the first exclusively makes use of all the resources in its server, while the second has to share them.

If you own a medium-sized website, virtual hosting is the most affordable and most efficient web hosting solution you can avail of, since you own only a small part of the web server, while your site is given its own identity as if it had an exclusive server. A 5GB server space can cost you about $15 per month, while you can enjoy a 3GB disk space for only $3 to $4.