Web Hosting 101

dedciated-web-hostingYou have your new business financially supported thanks to federal small business grants for women, and ready to convey to the online world that you have something to offer. You also have arranged for a catchy domain name. However, you still need to find a web host for the site you’re going to be building. So, what does web hosting mean? How would you determine which web hosting is best for you?

What is web hosting?

Web hosting is renting web server space. Hosting companies house personnel and hardware to maintain and run several servers at once. A web server offers important services such as the facility to produce email addresses based on your domain name, to send and receive emails, to enable your site to run programs, to build and manage databases, to display images and videos, and many other useful functions. Nearly any kind of computer can operate as a web server, but it’s the installed software that makes it a server.

In purchasing web hosting, take note that the monthly fee you’ll be paying goes to the maintenance and upgrades of the server’s hardware, software, and the costs of sustaining it online 24 hours daily in a secure data center with powerful and fast Internet access, and to the personnel who do all the work for you.

Types of web hosting

Shared Hosting – It simply hosts more than one site on a specific server. Most websites run in a shared web hosting environment.

Shared hosting is more affordable than any other type of web hosting since the server’s resources can be divided among the hosted clients and its operating costs. Shared hosting packages allow each client a particular amount of resource representing disk space, uptime, email addresses, bandwidth, CGI scripts, etc. Shared hosting is also referred to as virtual hosting.

Dedicated Hosting – You might want to hog a web server all to yourself if you have a large website that gets tons of traffic and dominates resources. For instance, large corporations prefer the extra security of not having to share their servers with others.

Dedicated hosting is renting an entire server where the web hosting company still owns the operating machine, and makes continuous hardware and software maintenance. But, you will have greater control over the use of the server and its configuration. Dedicated hosting costs more than shared hosting.

Server Co-Location – If you desire for complete control over every element of your web server and have the sufficient knowledge about web hosting, you might opt to purchase your own and maintain it yourself.

Still, chances are that you might not have the necessary resources to keep your server entirely safe and secure from computer crashes, power outages, thieves, and other hazards and maintain it on the Internet on a powerful, high-bandwidth connection at all times. You require a trusted data center to deliver these kinds of services for you.

Co-location means renting physical security, unremitting electrical power and a fast, dependable Internet access for a server that you own.

The data center is not held accountable for any sort of hardware or software maintenance of a co-located server. You are the one responsible for these kinds of maintenance. This can be a more affordable substitute to dedicated hosting if you have the basic expertise and time to manage a web server yourself.