What is Web Hosting

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What is Web Hosting

Date Added: October 31, 2008 11:54:36 AM

Author: Tim Cambier

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a service which offers individuals and businesses interested in publishing web pages on the internet, a place to store their content (text, images, video, etc.). In simplistic terms, a web hosting company "rents" out space on the servers which it owns. This space is purchased by people like you and me for a monthly or yearly fee. By purchasing this online space you can publish web pages (for example HTML, PHP and ASP) for all the world to see. This gives other people or companies who surf the web a way to access your web pages.

Web hosting companies generally utilize data centers (multiple web servers networked together) to manage their customer web sites. Some web hosting companies may be managing thousands of customers and have data centers located around the world.

Key elements of a respectable data center are facility and data security, server redundancy, server availability (expect 99% uptime at the least), facility structure (earthquake proof, fire proof, flood proof, etc.).

Features

Today there are thousands of web hosting companies looking for your business. But remember, even with all the companies out there, web hosting companies maintain some commonality among the features they offer.

Operating System	Windows, Linux and Unix are the most common operating/server plans you can buy. For simple web sites choose an operating system you are familiar with to decrease the learning curve. But be careful, some web hosting companies will charge more for Windows hosting plans. In addition, if you will rely on a web site with very dynamic content (database driven), then be sure to find an operating system/server plan which offers a more robust database. Windows plans generally offer SQL Server or Oracle database connectivity, whereas Linux and Unix rely more heavily on integration with mySQL.
Disk Space	Each plan allows you a limited amount of space on the web hosting server. Disk space is just that.
Bandwidth / Month	This is another limit imposed by web hosting companies. It acts as a throttle to control and balance out the activity of your website, and the other web sites on your server. Bandwidth is simply the amount of information or data that can be sent over a network connection in a given period of time. Bandwidth is usually stated in bits per second (bps), kilobits per second (kbps), or megabits per second (mps). Each time someone opens one of your web pages, downloads an image, file or video, data is passed over the Internet from your hosted web server to your visitors web browser.
Email Accounts	An email account is generally created for your hosting plan and can be directly related to your domain name at times. Some companies will allow you free access to email accounts while others may charge a nominal fee. If you require more email capability such as newsletters, multiple addresses or email forwarding you can always upgrade to a more robust email package with most hosting providers.

Different Kinds Of Web Hosting

With the multitude of web hosting providers on the market today you will have many choices to make when deciding on one. There are about four main categories a web hosting provider may fall into.

Free Web Hosting - remember the old adage, you get what you pay for, and nothing in life is free. What you save on hosting charges may be spent on questionable customer/technical support, finding ways to minimize the number of web hosting provider banners on your free web site, less than acceptable server performance and availability and limited capabilities (email, FTP, operating systems, database, CGI, Perl, etc.)

Shared Hosting - shared hosting is the most common form of web hosting. It's cost effective and allows you to have some level of control over your "rented" area of the web server. Payments plans can be monthly or yearly and the amount of disk space can vary with how much you pay. Bandwidth is usually governed much tighter because you are in fact "sharing" the server with many other web site owners. The fact that you are sharing your web server may also impact performance and reliability at times. Check with your web host of choice to learn more about their performance and reliability on their shared hosting plans to find out more.

Dedicated Hosting - this type gives you complete management and administration over a server located a web hosting company data center. You are the only person or business who can access it and store files on it. This is a more costly plan and is generally utilized by larger companies who manage high traffic commerce web sites. There are even cases where people but these type of web hosting plans to start their own hosting company.

Colocated Hosting - Similar to dedicated hosting but the difference is simple; you own the server but it is located in a data center managed and owned by the web hosting company. Much more expensive than the other plans and you are required to pay fees for server maintenance (patches, security updates, software upgrades) as well as for bandwidth utilization.

A growing trend in hosting companies is domain name registration and DNS management.

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Related Articles

Internet Glossary

Choosing a Domain Name

Understanding the World Wide Web

Determine your Web Site Objective

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