Understanding Web Hosting

You've all made new business now and you're ready to take the next step and set up a website to the online world know that you are here and you have something to offer. You have found a catchy domain name to your own and call now ... what now? Well, the answer is that you need to find web hosting for the website you will build. So what does this mean and how do you figure out what kind of web hosting you need? Let us start with the basics.

Just what is web hosting anyway?

In simple terms, web hosting is renting space on a Web server. A website is not just a domain name, is a collection of files linked together by HTML code to text and images are displayed on a computer. In order for everyone to this collection of files that you created see, to be hosted on a computer somewhere that has access to the Internet. Not just a computer, there naturally. A web server is a computer configured with special software that allows requests from the Internet to receive the website files, and send those files over the Internet so that the requesting computer can display it. It is very much like a waiter in a restaurant taking your order and bring the food you ask for from the kitchen, hence the name "server."

Along with ensuring that your files can be viewed by Internet users around the world, a web server provides other important services. First and foremost is the ability to email addresses using your domain name and make and receive e-mail to send them. The web server has several types of software installed on which your website to run programs, create and manage databases, video, and many other features you may find useful. Virtually any type of computer can act as a Web server, but it's the software out there that makes it a server.

If you buy webhosting, the monthly fee you pay goes to the continued maintenance and upgrading of server hardware and software, the cost of keeping it online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a secure data center with a fast and powerful internet connection, and pay for the expertise of the people all that work. It is entirely possible to own your home or office computer into a web server if you really want, but in most cases much more economical to pay someone else, which is dedicated to providing this service in a good reliable than it is to try it yourself.

What types of hosting are there?

Shared Hosting - Most websites are not big business with hundreds of pages and thousands of files and images, and they are directed to a specific audience, so they will not so many visitors to get as the big general sites like Yahoo aimed at anyone using the Internet. As such, the average website is not going to all the resources of an entire Web server to run it. Web servers are designed to handle tens, even hundreds of websites simultaneously, because they are powerful machines.

Shared hosting is simply the concept of hosting more than one website on a particular server. More than 95% of all websites on the Internet are performed in a shared hosting environment. Since the resources of the server can be distributed among the clients hosted on, so the operating costs of the server, so shared hosting is universally cheaper than any other type. Shared hosting packages are generally designed so that each customer has a certain amount from each source, with different levels pay different amounts of resources like disk space, bandwidth, email addresses assigned, and so on. Shared hosting is also known as virtual hosting.

Dedicated hosting - If you have a big, powerful website that receives many visitors and has a tendency to hog resources, you might want to have a web server all to yourself. Some companies also prefer the added security of not having the server with anyone who could do something accidentally or deliberately crashing share. Renting the use of an entire server is known as dedicated hosting. The web hosting company still owns the machine and takes responsibility for maintaining the hardware and software, web hosting, but you have more control over the configuration and use of the server. There is also something like a semi-dedicated hosting, which is divided between a Web server, but a very small number of customers, such as 2 to 4, with strong partitions between each to avoid interfering with each other. Since the hosting company is still responsible for maintaining the server, this type of hosting is also known as managed hosting. For obvious reasons, dedicated hosting always costs significantly more than shared hosting.

Server co-location - If you really complete control over every aspect of your Web server, you can very well choose to buy one yourself and if you have sufficient knowledge to keep. However, chances are that you still do not have the resources to keep your server completely safe from power outages, roof leaks, thieves, unwary employees and other hazards and to keep the internet on a fast, high-bandwidth connections at all times. You have a data center to provide these services for you. Co-location is the rental of physical security, continuous power and a fast, reliable Internet connection to a server that you own. The data center is not responsible for any of the hardware or software maintenance of a co-located server, you are. This may be a cheaper alternative to dedicated hosting if you have the necessary expertise and time to a web server itself to run.

Some web hosts offer UNIX hosting and Windows hosting. What's the difference?

The terms UNIX hosting and Windows hosting refer to the operating system (OS) running on the server. The operating system is of course the software that allows the computer to function and all other hardware and software that is installed on the site. Chances are that you read on a computer running a version of the Windows operating system, the most popular operating system in the world for personal and business computers. Other operating systems that is growing in popularity are Macintosh and various versions of Linux. However, the operating system you use on your computer is irrelevant to which type of hosting you choose. Here are some of the main features of UNIX and Windows:

UNIX Hosting

The majority of web servers in the world today run on one of the many variants of UNIX. The UNIX operating system

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