Activity

So you’re looking to understand about web hosting and what it has to offer or you may not know much about web hosting? There is no shame in not knowing this information. Everyone has to start in the beginning at some point. On that note, lets begin studying web hosting.

First off, what is web hosting and so how exactly does it work?

Web hosting is the business practice of providing space and bandwidth on a high-powered computer server that is connected to the web at very high speeds. Hosting companies maintain large networks of high-powered web server computers in a physical location referred to as a data center. These computer servers are connected to a very fast, and generally redundant, Internet connection. The data centers have primary and backup power, a fast connection to the Internet, and a security monitoring staff.

The web hosting companies provide a share of disk space and available bandwidth to a person for a monthly fee. After the customer is signed up, they are able to upload files to their personal space on the internet server and the information is then viewable to anyone interested on the net. The monthly fee the web hosting company charges is much less than what it would cost to run a server out of your own home or data center. This is why these companies exist. They look after all the hardware, software, and other technical needs for you.

Types of web hosting

There are many different forms of web hosting offers, but the main three are shared, reseller, and dedicated. Each kind of hosting is for another purpose.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting may be the most popular form of hosting. Shared hosting is a part of disk space and bandwidth provided for you by the web webhost on a high-powered server. There are plenty of other web sites hosted on this server, and the hosting company is likely to have several of these servers in a big data center. The sources of the server are shared by as many other websites as are allocated to that computer.

Shared web hosting is the greatest form of web hosting if you are looking for a great price and don’t have more than a couple thousand daily visitors to your site.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller web hosting is a popular, low-cost solution to starting your own website hosting business. There are two types of reseller hosting, private-label and a reseller of services.

The private-label is the foremost type of reseller plan because it allows you to retain full control over your customer’s websites. A private-label plan allows the reseller to help keep the full monthly payment of the web-hosting customer, however the reseller must pay a monthly fee to the larger webhost for the reseller space. The more hosting accounts a private-label reseller can sell, the bigger the profit for them. Private-label hosting permits you to host many more websites than if you were using shared hosting for each. This is a great solution for someone who has many sites they have to host in one location to save lots of money.

The reseller of services plans resell the standard web hosting plans of a more substantial web hosting company, nevertheless, you get a discounted price for providing the client and earn a monthly fee for as long as they remain a customer. This plan will not allow control over customer web sites and you only keep a portion of the potentially monthly revenue.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated web hosting may be the most powerful and affordable solution of hosting a busy site without resorting to buying your personal equipment and paying a huge selection of dollars per month for a fast Internet connection. Dedicated hosting consists of single server without one else hosting on that computer. This allows for the best of configuration options. Anyone who has a busy website will find dedicated hosting may be the necessary choice.

Web Hosting Considerations

Wondering about the rest of the information listed in website hosting plans? In this section, I am going to explain the most important considerations in selecting a good web host.

Price

The price of web hosting services is probably the most important. There are numerous hosting companies on the market with cheap hosting packages, however they may be lacking in the areas. Don’t let the price of a hosting package fool you. There are some hosting companies out there who have great prices and another features are just nearly as good. Price may be one of the most important decisions of a web hosting plan, but there is much more to consider in selecting a quality web host.

Disk Space / Storage Space

Disk space is the amount of physical storage space a hosting company gives to you to store your online files. Hosting companies these days have plans with disk space being measured mostly when it comes to gigabytes, but some are still offering plans in the megabytes for storage space. Depending on your preferences for file storage space, you may need more or less. Usually the more disk space offered, the higher.

Bandwidth / Data Transfer

The volume of bandwidth available can make a big difference in choosing a quality hosting plan. In general, the more bandwidth a webhost makes available to you, the higher. This means it is possible to support more traffic to your web site as your organization grows. Be wary of website hosting companies offering unlimited or unmetered bandwidth. Even though many of these are legitimate offers, there are a few out there that are overselling their bandwidth hoping the average user won’t use much.

Customer Support

In any business, it is vital to provide exception customer support. Web hosting is no exception to this. Many of the hosting companies are available all day and night in case you have a problem with your internet site, but there are some that are just available specific hours of the day. If your web site falls in the middle of the night time when they’re not available, this implies lost revenue for a small business. You should make sure the net host you select is always available for support.

Money Back Guarantee

Most web hosting companies will provide a thirty-day money-back guarantee. Some provides one even long, but be skeptical of the ones who offer no money back guarantee. I would not purchase website hosting services from a company would you not offer at the very least a 30 day money back guarantee, unless they have proven themselves to be a leader in the industry and have an excellent reputation.

Operating System

An operating system is a software application that controls the interaction between the computer user and the physical hardware of the machine. A vast majority of all web sites on the net run on the Linux operation system. Linux is generally a lot more stable than Windows. Stability is crucial in running a internet site. For this reason, I favor to host my sites on the Linux operating-system. Some sites have specific requirements that only the Windows operating system can satisfy, but you can find always alternatives to those requirements.

Backup

A good web hosting company will have a normal schedule to backup the info on all the web servers. The more often the data is supported, the better. At the minimum, a hosting company should backup site files daily.

Control Panel

The control panel may be the point of contact the website administrator will have between your host server and their very own machine connected via the Internet. It is essential to have a well organized and easy to use control panel interface. The best control panel is cPanel, that is one of the leading web hosting control panels on the market today. Plesk is another good one, and several companies will create their very own control panel for you to use. Most web hosting companies will provide a link to a demo of the control panel they use with their hosting plans. The control panel used is really a matter of preference, but it should be user friendly.

Email

Email is essential section of communication on the Internet. Most web hosting companies out there will provide you with more email addresses and much more space to hold email messages than you will ever need. What you must watch out for is the companies that have made a decision to be a little strict on the email accounts and only provide a small number or a little bit of message space.

Uptime

Uptime is a term used to describe how often the average internet site hosted by a company can be acquired online. No company should be expected to provide a precise 100% uptime. That is impossible due to things such as hardware, software, and power failures. A massive majority of the companies have become good with uptime, and they guarantee it. It really is still a good idea to be aware of the uptimes posted by the company. If it is not at least 99.5%, it is probably not worth hosting with that company.

Statistics

As a webmaster, it is nice to know how many visitors you’ve had, where they originated from, how long they stay on your site, and just how much bandwidth they’ve used. This information is collected by the web server and is positioned in a log file. A statistics program can read this data and provide meaningful information to the webmaster. The info gathered from these logs can be quite valuable in improved services to the viewers of the web page.

FTP

FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It is just a method of quickly uploading or downloading many files to and from a web server. Most web hosting companies allows their customers usage of their website hosting accounts via FTP. FTP is quite useful and is a great feature to have when paying for a web hosting account.

Scripting

Since the World Wide Web began, many scripting languages have been created and have evolved into the dynamic and interactive environment we enjoy today. A scripting language is really a way of adding functionality to a web site, whether to calculate numbers or to load information from an external database. Scripting languages have made electronic commerce possible. Some of these languages include PHP, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion, VBscript, Javascript, and Perl. I won’t go into the information on these in this article for the sake of complexity. If you know how to use these languages, you should know what to search for in a web server for them.

Databases

A database is a place to store data which you can use in a large variety of ways. Databases are used online for applications such as shopping carts, community forums, and product catalogues. The more databases the net hosting provider lets you create, the most applications you can deploy on your own web server. Databases are employed by the more advanced web master, but information is freely available online for anyone who is interested.

Conclusions

Web hosting can be quite a very difficult decision with the countless thousands of hosting companies out there. It is critical to look for a plan that fits your preferences and to have an excellent hosting company. I hope this short article was useful in making your decision about which company to host with.
Best Web Hosting Company Happy Hosting!