Is it possible to have my website hosted by a company in the beginning and then when I have resources, then buy my own servers and hard drives and put all my data from my web host to my own servers. If yes, how do we do that?

Many web hosting services claim that they offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space. If that's true then why people at wikipedia and other commercial organizations (like Facebook and YouTube may be ) have their own servers? Why don't they utilize some good web hosting service?

GB

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Originally Posted by Grammarian-Bot

Is it possible to have my website hosted by a company in the beginning and then when I have resources, then buy my own servers and hard drives and put all my data from my web host to my own servers. If yes, how do we do that?

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Yes, FTP is typically used to upload/download content.

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... why people... have their own servers?

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Why doesn't everybody drive the same model car? For me, there would be certain value in being able to walk over to the physical server and do whatever when's there's a problem instead of having to phone up the techs at the hosting company and then wait for resolution. Plus if I've already got my own staffed datacenter for internal company uses, adding another web server doesn't really cost me anything. Then there's the issue of control, security, and response. If I'm running a database driven website and the database is under my roof, I don't really need to be communicating financial data or other secrets all the way across the Internet to a web server who knows where.

Note that this is a duplicate of this question.

To host your own website you will need the following;
1. Good broadband speed connection at home (ISP)
2. You will need a static IP (you can get this from your provider for a fee) or a dynamic IP DNS service such as DynDNS: DNS Hosting, Email Delivery and Other Services .
3. You will need to by a domain name for a reputable domain name register and get some software to be able to create/edit a website with (or use a free website builder program from whoever you purchase your domain name from, if they offer such service).
4. You will also need to setup a server at home using Windows (IIS) or Linux (Apache), you can run a server off a Windows XP Professional machine by installing IIS on it.
5. You will need to know how to configure your home networking equipment to have a static IP or use the DYNDNS service and need to know how to configure your server to host your website on.

I have only briefly listed some things you would need to acquire before being able to host your own website at home. I have not mentioned the cost of hardware you would need either, just wanting to let you know it takes a lot more then some people think to be able to host your own website at home. If you still want to do this then let us know and we can take you step by step.
Side Note: This is not to be taken on by a novice computer user, a person needs to understand the implications of what they are doing when they want to point people form the Internet to their home network... security, security, security.

When you get to be the next Google or Facebook, then worry about getting your own in-house server farm. I suspect it would take a few years to get there. :)

It's a matter of bandwidth: the number of people visiting these sites every day is astronomical, and it makes sense for them to build their own IT departments for this. Note however that there are fairly big companies that subcontract out their hosting; Jungle Disk is an online storage provider, for example, that hosts on Amazon.com's S3 platform.

Note that the companies that claim to offer "unlimited bandwidth" in their literature often have small print in their Terms Of Service that indicate they can shut down an account for "abuse" of bandwidth... and that usually means whatever they want it to mean. Which means if you start getting millions of hits a day, you may very well be suspended or shut down permanently. That's why companies like Rackspace.com exist - to service the higher end market.

So my advice is, start small and use your hosting company's tools like Webalizer and Awstats to monitor your traffic... you'll know when you're growing big enough to need a higher-end solution. :)