What is hosting and how to choose it for your business?

Hosting is a server that stays connected to the internet around the clock and holds your site's files and database. A domain is the address people find you at (dukon.uz, say). Hosting is the house behind that address. Buying a domain without hosting is ordering a shopfront sign before renting the shop. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMEONE OPENS YOUR SITE The browser asks DNS which server your domain belongs to, gets an IP address and knocks on it. The server assembles the page — pulls products from the database, fills in prices — and sends it back. All of this takes fractions of a second, and where the server stands and how busy it is decides whether the visitor sees the page in half a second or in five. For Uzbekistan this is not an abstract question. If the server sits in Europe, the signal travels there and back, and every request carries that delay. So for a site selling in Tashkent, where the machine physically stands matters. WHICH PLAN YOU ACTUALLY NEED A business-card site, a landing page, a portfolio. A few pages, a dozen photographs, an enquiry form. The smallest shared-hosting plan is enough. Five gigabytes is a great deal of text and about a thousand photographs at a sensible size. An online shop with one or two hundred products. You need a database, photographs in two or three sizes, and room for orders. Take a plan from the middle of the range: ten to twenty gigabytes and more memory, because a shop engine is heavier than a landing page. Several projects at once. If you are a studio or a freelancer running five client sites, count the total rather than one site. And watch the plan's limits on domains and databases — they usually run out before the disk does. A busy project with its own logic, Node.js or Python. Shared hosting gives you PHP on every plan; Node.js and Python only on the largest. If your project runs on those, look at the top plan or go straight to a VPS with root access. WHAT TO LOOK AT BESIDES THE PRICE The disk and its type. An NVMe drive reads data several times faster than an ordinary SSD, which is several times faster than a hard disk. For a shop with a database you feel it on every page. CPU and I/O limits. Not marketing, but real ceilings: how much processor time and how many disk operations your site may take without crowding its neighbours. Smaller plans have lower ceilings, and under a rush of visitors the site slows down sooner. The SSL certificate. Without https the browser says "Not secure" and search engines push the site down. A Let's Encrypt certificate is free and renews itself — there is no reason to pay for one in 2026, and if a provider asks for money, ask exactly what for. Backups. The question is not whether something will go wrong but when. Find out whether copies are taken daily, how many are kept and — most importantly — whether you can restore one yourself, without writing to support and waiting. How long setup takes. Shared hosting should switch on immediately after payment. If a provider wants a day to "configure" ordinary hosting, that is odd. The language of support. Explaining a site problem in a foreign language at three in the morning is its own kind of pleasure. Ask in advance which language they answer in, and during which hours. HOW THIS WORKS AT ORAX Shared hosting starts at $0.88 a month. Billing is in US dollars and the site shows the so'm figure at the rate at the moment of payment — so the number in so'm moves while the plan does not. You can pay by the day, the week, the month, three months, six months or the year. A year comes out roughly a fifth cheaper than twelve separate months — if you are confident in the project, take the longer term. If you are not, start with a month: you can switch plans at any time, and unspent money is not forfeited, it is recalculated. On every plan: free SSL, daily backups, unlimited mail and FTP, SSH access, NVMe disks. The control panel is ISPmanager or FastPanel, depending on the server. Hosting switches on automatically a few seconds after payment. VPS machines, dedicated servers and panel licences we hand over personally — that takes up to one business day, and we say so plainly at checkout. We promise 99.9% uptime per month. If we miss it, the compensation is credited automatically, with no claim and no correspondence. You see your own uptime and the list of outages on your service page: an SLA only the provider can measure is a slogan, not an obligation. You sign in through MyIT, with one account and no separate Orax password. The cabinet is in Uzbek, Russian and English. WHAT WE DO NOT HAVE So you do not waste your time: we do not sell Windows or RDP hosting, we do not offer CDN or DDoS protection as a separate product, we do not run standalone mail hosting without a site, and we do not sell paid SSL certificates — only free Let's Encrypt ones. If you need any of those, we are not the right fit, and it is better to know that now. WHERE TO START Estimate how many pages and photographs you will have and take a plan with a little room to spare — but not the largest one "to grow into". You can move up any day, and you pay only the difference for the remaining term. Paying a year for capacity you will need in a year makes no sense. You can see the plans with their specifications and prices in the Hosting section, and compare them side by side on the comparison page.