What You Need To Know About Web Hosting (Robert Johnson)
Nov 1, 2010
A web hosting service is something that is provided by a web services company, where you can get your own website online and have it fully accessible world wide. Whenever you visit a website, no matter what, it is making use of web hosting. Companies that offer this service are known as web hosts.
Web hosts often own actual servers for storing their customers websites on, sometimes there may only be a handful of servers, but bigger hosts will usually have huge data centers containing up to thousands of servers. Not all web hosts own their own servers though, some rent them out and sell the web space to people - this is common for smaller companies.
Bigger and more serious web hosts will usually buy bulk amounts of server boxes continuously. These are often good businesses to buy from, but you need to keep an eye out for the ones that have strong reputations in their uptime, maintenance and customer services. Plenty of web hosts can be big and profitable but still offer a poor service, resulting in customer websites going down regularly. Nowadays, the competition for these businesses is incredibly high because it's cheap and easy to rent a couple of server boxes and start a web hosting company.
You should keep in mind that there are two different kinds of web hosting - shared hosting, and then dedicated server hosting. Shared hosting is the most common and is low in cost, and it's ideal for hobby websites, informational websites, and small business websites. There are multiple customers per server, hence "shared hosting". When renting a dedicated server instead, you're the only one on that server, which means its storage and processing power is exclusive to your usage. While it may cost a lot more, it's great for businesses with its fast speed and strong security.
If you have a hobby website, or any kind of information website, then shared hosting is likely all you need. Larger websites, such as web applications with a lot of functionality, tend to be better off with dedicated server hosting. Shared hosting comes lower in price, which means it's sought after by businesses that just need a starting point.
Once you've bought some web hosting, it is standard to get given FTP (File Transfer Protocol) login information. If you're wondering what FTP is, it's what's used for uploading files to your hosting account, where the files become available for access on the web. Luckily, it's not usually difficult to use, and this is due to the fact that the uploaded files are stored not much differently from how they are on your own hard drive - a set of folders containing your files. You can even transfer full folder structures so that it's all structured nicely for you on your account.
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