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Web Hosting – Made Simple

What is web hosting anyway? What do I get when I buy a website hosting solution?

To make thing clear from start let’s just say the way it all works.

Web pages basically consist of text and images. Generically, the information contained by these files is known as content. The look of the site is known as design.
In order to be accessible to internet surfers, all these files must be stored on the web server. You can imagine web servers as computers storing the files of tens or hundreds of web sites. These computers are all connected to the Internet through high-speed connection. Whenever you access a web page, your browser connects to the web server that stores that page and downloads it for your computer.

So a web server is essential when you plot to share your internet site content with internet users online. There are millions of web servers on the planet, and there are firms that own them. Such a company is called web-hosting provider.

A web-hosting provider might have dozens of web servers hosting a large number of internet sites. The web server computers are located usually in large numbers and therefore are all housed in special buildings or parts of buildings called data center. Apart from the high-speed Internet connection, these locations are positioned up to ensure the optimum operational conditions and security for the web servers. HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, & Ac) control, fire protection, virus protection, data backup facility, power backup, even autonomy in the event of disaster. Another term for that web servers within the data center is a web farm.

To be able to run your website properly you’ll need a space on the web server to keep your computer data as well as an Web connection to it. The quantity of data available to you on the web server is simply referred as space and is usually quantified in MB. The web connection needed which means that your web site could be accessed on the internet is referred as bandwidth and is also measured in MB or even GB.
Getting the glimpse of the fundamentals, it should be said that different web-hosting providers offer different space and bandwidth. Space and bandwidth are usually the main characteristics of a web-hosting plot.

The terminology related to web hosting can be very dazzling: virtual web hosting, dedicated hosting; co-locating hosting, hosting that is shared reseller hosting.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting or virtual website hosting are two terms for the same thing. Shared hosting means that on a web server are hosted many web sites that all have a defined quota of HDD space and bandwidth. All of them run simultaneously there can be from hundreds to thousands of web sites on the same web server. Because of the large number of web sites should you worry about exceeding the performance of the web server, issue also known as slow server response, and therefore these potential customers will have to wait too long for your web pages to load.
That is not often a genuine problem when dealing with serious web hosting providers, since the operational parameters from the web servers are monitored and appropriate actions will be taken in order to maintain the amount of service contracted.
The greater number of internet sites sharing the time of a web server (HDD space, bandwidth, memory, CPU time), the web host company can afford to offer its services cheaper. A minus would be that, even with high level of service, you’ll have to pay a slower server response time when choosing shared hosting.

Reseller Website hosting

When web-hosting providers offer their services, typically with a discount, to some third-party (a reseller that will thus be a web-hosting provider itself) and the latter subsequently offers web-hosting services under his branding. Indeed technically the reseller web hosting is very similar to shared hosting, as many web sites wind up sharing space and bandwidth on the same web server. The resellers tend to be web-site designers or web-developers who offer website hosting as part of their integrated services. As the web-hosting provider offers resellers vital discounts, the cost they are able to offers are among the smallest in the market.
Compared with the shared hosting, this system has technical support problem. It requires time and communication problems may occur around the course of your problem from the reseller to the web-hosting provider. Unless your site is a personal site or non-commercial one, this poor support issue is enough not to consider this most of your option.
Continuing this line of thought, how can you distinguish a reseller from a real web-hosting provider? It’s not the professional style of the web site, not really the support contact facilities offered as may resellers may have contracts with the provider on the tech support team and the person taking your calls might be employed by the provider and identify himself for you as an employee of the reseller. Solid company information is provided usually only by serious providers. The price, that may get as low as under 5$/month is another hint, but you should consider it carefully with prices dropping through the industry.

Co-location Web Hosting

Co-locating website hosting is similar with dedicated web hosting. The main difference is the fact that during web server the web server computer is one of the web-hosting provider and it is only rented through the customer, in co-locating web hosting the customer owns the web server computer. The web-hosting provider only houses the net server computer and sells bandwidth towards the customer. This gives the customer using co-locating web hosting full charge of the web server combined with the security from the data center.

Now you should be designed with the necessary information to select you website hosting. You should not try to find the lowest price possible, but give some extra thought to the quality of service you are buying and to the support provided by an internet host provider.

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