What is Web Hosting?

If you want to do online business, you must need website. Everybody wants to make their own website. In order to make it live, you will need web hosting service. Web hosting service provides you web space, where you can host your website.

Web Hosting

A web host is a company that has computers that are hooked up to the internet 24/7. These computers are called servers and they are assigned IP numbers in order that they may be found by other computers hooked up to the internet. It is on these servers that all your web files are stored, be they HTML files (web pages), graphic files, CSS files, Javascripts or whatever.

Basically what happens is when you type a web address into the address bar of your browser and then hit Go, your browser sends out a request to ‘get’ that web page. The request travels across the internet to the appropriate web server and attempts to locate the web page on that server. If the request is successful (web page exists) then that web page will load (or download) into your web browser.

These web hosting servers that store and serve up web pages to the internet cost money to set up, configure and maintain and thus web hosting providers that own these servers typically charge you a monthly or yearly fee to, at the very least:

1. Allow you to save your web files to their web server (called uploading)
2. Perpetually be ready to serve them up to the internet (make available for downloading)

Web hosting has become a very competitive business and, in order to entice more customers to sign up with them, web hosts now offer all kinds of bells and whistles to the deals or web hosting packages they make available.

Limitations and Features of Free Web Hosting
There are many free web hosting providers available. If you want to make personal website, free web hosting is great. Free web hosting has some limitation. They are free but they have maintenance expenses. So they put ads in your website to generate revenue. You cannot get your own domain with free web hosting. If you want to make professional website, free web hosting is not for you.

Intro to Paid Hosting – Shared & Dedicated Hosting
Paid web hosting is necessary to host your business web site. You can’t trust free hosting for that. Paid web hosting comes in two forms. 1) Dedicated Web Hosting & 2) Shared Web Hosting. In dedicated web hosting, you get the full server access. Your web site is hosted on your own server. In shared web hosting, you share the server resources with many other sites. Dedicated hosting is much more costly than shared web hosting.

Factors to Consider
There are many components of web hosting. Web hosting space and bandwidth are main components of web hosting. Some other factors to consider are more than one domain hosting, FTP and SSH access, PHP , reliability, customer support and of course price. One can select best web hosting for him based on these factors.

Two Main Factors of Web Hosting
Web hosting space is just like the hard disk space on your computer but this space is available to use via internet. You setup your web site pages on this space. Almost all web hosts provide unlimited web hosting space now a day. So you need not to worry about this hosting space. You get a data transfer limit. This is called your bandwidth limit. Most web hosts provide unlimited bandwidth.

Limited Domains Hosting or Unlimited Domains Hosting
When you place pages of your site at hosting providers, it’s called one domain hosting. Some hosting companies offer limited number of domain hosting while some offer unlimited number of domain hosting. If you are going to need to host many web sites then look for unlimited domains hosting.

File Transfer Protocol & Secure Shell
You need some kind of access to the server for uploading pages. This access is provided in two forms of protocols. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) & Secure Shall (SSH). All hosting service providers give FTP access to upload your pages on the server. SSH access is not provided by all hosting providers. Only few providers allow SSH access.

Dynamic Pages & PHP Support
Technology is growing very fast. Web site is not only static HTML pages. Today, web sites require PHP support. All paid hosting providers give PHP support. In PHP support, also there is a huge list of extensions. Support of these extensions may vary from provider to provider. Although in free web hosting you can’t expect PHP support.

Reliability and Uptime
Most service providers have 99.9% up time and very speedy of response time. High up time is necessary. You don’t want your website down or slow response time. This is very important factor to consider while choosing web hosting service provider.

Customer Support
You must need good customer support. Customer support should be 24/7 and very fast in response time. Your problem related to service cannot be easily solved if you don’t have good customer support. So good customer support is necessary.

Cost of Web Hosting
Price is also an important factor. You will get shared hosting account from $3 to $9 per month price. You get dedicated hosting account around $150 per month.

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