Basic Understanding of Web Hosting (Dhruv Patel)
Oct 13, 2009
Introduction
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.
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.
Shared & Dedicated Web Hosting
There are many kind of paid hosting but two kinds are very famous. 1) Shared hosting & 2) Dedicated server hosting. In shared web hosting, your server resources are shared among many sites. So it's called shared web hosting. In dedicated web hosting, you get the one separate server for your hosting. Dedicated web hosting services are more costly than shared hosting.
Components of Web Hosting
There are some basic components of web hosting. You should look at those components at the time of purchasing. In other words, you can say them features. These components includes web hosting space, bandwidth, domains hosting, FTP & SSH support, PHP support, reliability, customer support & price.
Web Space & Bandwidth
Web hosting space is provided in unit of bytes. Most of hosting providers provide Giga Bytes(GB) of space. Some web hosting services even provide unlimited web space. If the web site is very big then it requires Giga bytes of space. Most web sites fit in 3 GB of space. Bandwidth is a measure of data transfer. Now a days, web hosting providers offer unlimited bandwidth.
Domains Hosting
Many web hosting providers provide unlimited domain hosting. It means you can host as many websites as you like. Some service plans have limited domain hosting. You can select your service provider based on your requirement.
File Transfer Protocol & Secure Shall
When you subscribe to an web hosting account, you get an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access. FTP is used to upload your web site pages to the server. SSH (Secure Shall) is a protocol which you use to login to your server. After logging in to your server, you can directly edit, delete or create a new file. Only few web hosting providers give you SSH access.
Goodbye to Static HTML Pages
PHP support is a basic need in today's web sites. Web sites are not mealy static pages. You can generate dynamic pages with PHP support. PHP creates life in your web site. You also get many different PHP extensions installed. Even some web hosts allow you to change PHP extension settings.
Reliability
You need to decide also the reliability of the server. This is measured in uptime and the response time of the server. Web host should provide quick response time of the page requested on your web site. Also the uptime should be higher than 99.9%. If you are getting less up time than 98% then you need to change your web host.
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 Hosting a Web Site
Price or cost is very important factor while choosing web hosting service provider. Most shared hosting service provider offer unlimited data transfer and unlimited space for $5-$10/month. You can use coupons to save money. Most of service providers offer coupons.
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