A Web Hosting Guide

To expand the field of your business world, setting up a website for making your business a part of the online world of business, is definitely an aspect of paramount significance. Having consolidated the foundation, you; fancy of having a domain name and then follow the idea of finding web hosting for the purpose of the website you’re going to have. Primarily, you start thinking about the suitable web hosting that can help you. So, let me begin with the ABC of this world of web hosting.

Can you define web hosting?

Not just a domain name, but a group of files linked together by HTML code in order to put on view the text and graphics on a computer is what a website is all about. The compilation of your created files has to be saved somewhere in the computer (with special software) to show others, provided it has an Internet access. Generally speaking, web hosting is a renting space on a web server. A web server lets a computer have the requests from the Internet for the website files that has been stored. It also does send the files to the Internet for the purpose of displaying by the requesting computer. It is called ’server’ fir its same approach like a waiter in a restaurant.

A web server endows you with many services. It not only exhibits your files to the Internet users but also it can create email addresses on the basis of your domain name in order to send and receive email with them. Added to this service, a web server with a variety of software lets your website run programs, create and manage databases, exhibits video, and many other functions that can be of use. Computer is no barrier here because here software is everything and can make it a server.

I don’t need to say that the monthly payment you make after purchasing a web hosting is needed for the purpose of maintaining and upgrading the server’s hardware and software. It also includes the charge of keeping it online all the time in a secure data center with the aid of a fast Internet connection, and the payment of the people who are doing all these. One can surely roll his or her computer into a web server as soon as it is decided but the idea of entrusting a dedicated person (for this job) with this job is often a better and reasonable one. It requires you to pay that person but it is ideal if the person does it in a reliable manner.

Varieties of Web Hosting

Shared Hosting- Websites are usually targeted to a particular section of people for a particular purpose unlike the sites like Yahoo! (Meant for everybody using Internet). So, they don’t have thousands of pages or files. This point towards the fact that websites, in general, don’t need the entire globe of resources of a web server. Let me tell you then that usually the Web servers are capable of handling hundreds of websites at once because they are powerful machines. Over 95% of all websites follow the model of shared hosting that refers to the concept of hosting more than one website on a particular server. Shared hosting is undoubtedly inexpensive as compared to the other types because it not only shares resources of the server among the clients but also the cost. This also contributes to its popularity. Shared hosting (also called virtual hosting) lets each client have a certain amount of each resource. The payment levels vary in accordance with the varied amounts of resources like disk space, bandwidth, email addresses, and many more.

Dedicated Hosting- Having a web server that is dedicated to you is worthwhile if you believe your website will have many visitors or you do not wish to share a server with others or you do not wish to dominate shared resources. This equates to renting out an entire server for you and is known as dedicated hosting. The machine remains the property of the web hosting company as does hardware maintenance and web host software but responsibility for use and configuration of the server is given to the user. A variation on this theme is provided with semi-dedicated hosting and this is where the web hosting service is extended to a few clients, usually between two and four, and there are clear boundaries between the companies. This is viewed as managed hosting as the host company manages and maintains the server. As may be expected, dedicated hosting is dearer than shared hosting.

Server Co-Location- The best option for having everything of your web server in your own domain is to purchase one and then maintain it with the aid of your own knowledge about it. It might still not be enough to keep your server aloof from power outages, roof leaks, thieves, unwary employees and other problems. It might not be able to keep your server on the Internet on a fast connection as well but a data center endows you with all these services. One thing needs to be said here that the rental of physical security, uninterrupted electrical power and a high-speed Internet connection for a server is what we know as Co-location. It is very interesting that here you are responsible for the hardware or software maintenance of a co-located server. The data center has no part to play here. Having sufficient knowledge and time to maintain a web server, this option is better and cheaper than dedicated hosting.

UNIX Hosting-Although variations of web hosts have been mentioned it is more accurate to say that different version of the UNIX server is where the majority of web servers are run on. The UNIX system was pushed by universities as a method to assist servers and networks. The open source nature of the UNIX operating system has enabled technically minded people to gain the code for the system and produce variations of it. The popular ones of BSD and Linux that are part of the UNIX system have produced variations such as Red Hat Linux, Debian, FreeBSD and SuSE. This means that UNIX hosting is a low cost and highly efficient operating system for web hosts to get their hands on. This in turn allows the web host to charge a lower price for their services. Key benefits of the UNIX hosting platform is that the software will allow users the ability to complete a great number of programming applications and the platform is generally considered to be secure, reliable and packing a mighty punch. The phrase ‘UNIX hosting’ now comes to mean any platform that has been derived from the traditional form if UNIX.

Windows Hosting- Windows Server 2003 is a commercial product developed by Microsoft. As far as this product is concerned, an operator needs to purchase a license that raises the cost of entire process and gives birth to higher hosting prices. This special version of Windows operating system advanced by Microsoft is less powerful and secure than UNIX instead of Windows being deemed as perfect for users if you are to operate in a network environment. ASP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion are well-liked for some web programming applications and these scripting languages can only run on a Windows server like the Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access database programs. The idea of using all these requires you to have a Windows host.