Media Hosting Sites

Virtual hosting is same as share hosting. Shared hosting or virtual hosting means that you are sharing the web space or bandwidth of the server with other many websites. Usually there are few websites that require dedicated hosting. Shared hosting suffices the need of most people and this option is reliable and cheap or affordable. Dedicated hosting costs from 150$ /month where as you can get a very good shared hosting for 100$/year.
But there are limitations to shared hosting. In shared hosting you will be sharing the server's CPU & memory (ram) with other many more websites. Shared hosting is recommended for websites that have traffic less than 100,000/month (one hundred thousand).

The process of renting bandwidth and disk space to setup a website of your own is called webhosting.
You can get a free webhosting. There are numerous web hosts that provide free webhosting like Doteasy.com , 110mb and many more web hosting companies (more than 250). But most of them place ads on your website and it can become annoying.

Anyway nothing beats paid hosting. Paid hosting is always reliable than free hosts and they allow ads on your websites. There are many types of webhosting like

Free web hosting
Reseller webhosting
Shared web hosting
Dedicated Webhosting

You have to choose in which OS (operating system) your website will be hosted in. Most of the web hosting providers give option to choose either Unix or BSD like system or Windows. If need to run web applications based on .asp, .netMS SQL, SBS you have to host your website on windows server. If you want to run cronjobs or other unix based applications you have to use unix or linux servers. There are some differences while making a website which will be hosted on linux and windows servers. If you are building you website to host on a linux server you have to name your extension of html files as .htm and .shtml files as .shtm .

For your web pages to be served to the world they must be kept on a webserver which send them to every visitor or client that requests them. Suppose if your webserver has an internet ip address 9.123.168.55. The user or a visitor has to type http://9.123.168.55 to acces you home page. As you can see how awkard it is to type the internet ip address and most of the users forget them (they dont remember all those numbers). Now if you register a domain name like mysite.com then the ip address 9.123.168.55 gets associated with the domain name. When a  visitor types mysite.com in his browser, it requests the domain naming servers to resolve the ip associated with mysite.com which gives the ip address associated with that domain name. Domain  is one of the important  factors of website. Suppose if you search for fruit in google the site www.fruit.com appears in the first ten results. The domain name keywords are very important in search engine optimization. Choosing domain with relevant domain name can boost your traffic. Domain names are also very convinient to promote (like visit my website http://www.mysite.com ) and easy to remember. Also keep in mind to choose short domain names without  any hifens ..