Web Hosting – A Guide For Beginners Connected to the Internet
You may be curious about web hosting. This information is not necessarily wrong. Everybody has to start from the beginning. Let's now learn more about web hosting.
Let's start with what web hosting is and how it works.
Hosting is the practice of hosting a high-powered server computer that connects to the Internet at high speeds. Hosting companies have large networks of web server computers that are high-powered in a physical location called a data center. These servers are connected to an extremely fast and redundant Internet connection. Data centers are equipped with backup and primary power, fast Internet connections, and security personnel.
For a monthly fee, web hosting companies offer a portion of the disk space and bandwidth available to customers. After signing up, customers can upload files to their own space on the webserver. This information is then available to everyone who is interested. The monthly fees charged by web hosting companies are far less than the cost of running a server from your home or data center. These companies exist because they are affordable. These companies take care of all your technical needs, including hardware and software.
Types of web hosting
There are many different types of web hosting offers, but the main three are shared, reseller, and dedicated. Each type of hosting is for a different purpose.
Shared Web Hosting
Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of disk space and bandwidth provided to you by the web hosting company on a high-powered server. There are many other websites hosted on this server, and the hosting company is likely to have quite a few of these servers in a large data center. The resources of the server are shared by as many other websites as are allocated to that computer.
Shared web hosting is the best form of web hosting if you are looking for a great price and don’t have more than a couple of thousand daily visitors to your site.
Reseller Web Hosting
Reseller web hosting is a popular, low-cost solution to starting your own web hosting business. There are two types of reseller hosting, private-label, and reseller of services.
The private label is the best 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 keep the full monthly payment of the web-hosting customer, but the reseller must pay a monthly fee to the larger hosting company for the reseller space. The more hosting accounts a private-label reseller can sell, the higher the profit for them. Private-label hosting allows 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 need to host in one location to save money.
The reseller of services plans resell the regular web hosting plans of a larger web hosting company, but you get a discounted price for providing the customer and earn a monthly fee for as long as they remain a customer. This plan does not allow control over customer websites and you only keep a portion of the potentially monthly revenue.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated web hosting is the most powerful and cost-effective solution for hosting a busy website without resorting to buying your own equipment and paying hundreds of dollars per month for a fast Internet connection. Dedicated hosting consists of a single server with no one else hosting on that computer. This allows for the greatest of configuration options. Anyone who has a busy website will find dedicated hosting is the necessary choice.
Web Hosting Considerations
Wondering about all the other information listed in web hosting plans? In this section, I will explain the most important considerations in choosing a good web host.
Price
The price of web hosting services is one of the most important. There are many hosting companies out there with cheap hosting packages, but they may be lacking in other areas. Don’t let the price of a hosting package fool you. There are some hosting companies out there who have great prices and the other features are just as good. Price may be one of the most important decisions of a web hosting plan, but there is much more to consider in choosing a quality web host.
Disk Space / Storage Space
Disk space is the amount of physical storage space a web host gives to you to store your web files. Hosting companies these days have plans with disk space being measured mostly in terms of gigabytes, but some are still offering plans in the megabytes for storage space. Depending on your needs for file storage space, you may need more or less. Generally, the more disk space offered, the better.
Bandwidth / Data Transfer
The amount of bandwidth available can make a big difference in choosing a quality hosting plan. In general, the more bandwidth a hosting company makes available to you, the better. This means you can support more traffic to your website as your business grows. Be wary of web hosting companies that offer unlimited or unmetered bandwidth. While many of these are legitimate offers, there are some out there who are overselling their bandwidth in hopes the average user won’t use much.
Customer Support
In any business, it is very important to provide exceptional customer service. 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 website, but there are some who are just available at specific hours of the day. If your website goes down in the middle of the night when they’re not available, this means lost revenue for a business. You should make sure the web host you select is always available for support.
Money-Back Guarantee
Most web hosting companies will provide a thirty-day money-back guarantee. Some will provide one even long, but be wary of the ones who offer no money-back guarantee. I would not purchase web hosting services from a company that does not offer at 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 piece of software that controls the interaction between the computer user and the physical hardware of the machine. A vast majority of all websites on the Internet run on the Linux operation system. Linux is generally much more stable than Windows. Stability is critical in running a website. For this reason, I prefer to host my websites on the Linux operating system. Some sites have specific requirements that only the Windows operating system can satisfy, but there are always alternatives to those requirements.
Backup
A good web hosting company will have a regular schedule to backup the data on all the web servers. The more often the data is backed up, the better. At the very least, a web hosting company should backup website files daily.
Control Panel
The control panel is the point of contact the website administrator will have between the host server and their own machine connected via the Internet. It is essential to have a well-organized and easy-to-use control panel interface. My favorite control panel is cPanel, which is one of the leading web hosting control panels out there today. Plesk is another good one, and many companies will create their 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 a matter of preference, but it should be user-friendly.
Email is an essential part of communication on the Internet. Most web hosting companies out there will give you more email addresses and more space to hold email messages than you will ever need. What you need to watch out for is the companies that have decided to be a little strict on their email accounts and only offer a small number or a small amount of message space.
Uptime
Uptime is a term used to describe how often the average website hosted by a company is available online. No company should be expected to provide an exact 100% uptime. This is impossible due to things such as hardware, software, and power failures. A vast majority of the companies are very good with uptime, and they guarantee it. It is still a good idea to be conscious 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 came from, how long they stay on your site, and how much bandwidth they’ve used. This information is collected by the web server and is placed in a log file. A statistics software package can read this data and provide meaningful information to the webmaster. The information gathered from these logs can be very valuable in improving services to the viewers of the website.
FTP
FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It is a way of quickly uploading or downloading many files to and from a web server. Most web hosting companies will allow their customers access to their web hosting accounts via FTP. FTP is very 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 a way of adding functionality to a website, whether it be 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 details of these in this article for the sake of complexity. If you know how to use these languages, you should know what to look for in a web server for them.
Databases
A database is a place to store data that can be used in a large variety of ways. Databases are used on the Internet for applications such as shopping carts, message boards, and product catalogs. The more databases the web hosting provider allows you to create, the more applications you can deploy on your web server. Databases are used by the more advanced webmaster, but the information is freely available online should you be interested.
Conclusions
Web hosting can be a very difficult decision with the many thousands of hosting companies out there. It is critical to find a plan that fits your needs and to have a good hosting company. I hope this article was useful in making your decision about which company to host with. Happy Hosting!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/143004
