What is web hosting
The World Wide Web (www) as we know is a huge collection of web sites that are hosted on web servers all around the globe. The web server or the computer where your web sites, graphics, html files and all are located in called as a web host.
Web hosting is a service that helps businesses as well as people in providing their web site to be accessible through the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that give space on their servers so that their clients can make use of it. These web hosts can also provide connectivity to the Internet and also provide data center space for the servers that they do not own to be present in their data center. This is called as co-location.
The web hosting service scope
The scope of web hosting varies widely. The most basic is the small scale file hosting and the web page hosting, where the files can be uploaded by the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or by a web interface. There are a number of Internet service providers that offer these services that are free of cost.
However, people can also obtain the web page hosting service from other service providers. Usually the personal web hosting is free or is advertisement-sponsored. However, the business web site hosting is costly. For personal web pages a single page hosting is sufficient.
But if it is a complex site then it requires more comprehensive package and it provides application development forms like PHP, Java, and ASP.NET and database support. With the help of these facilities the customers can write or install material for applications for content management and forums.
The web hosting service might also provide an interface control panel like cPanel, Plesk or Hosting control etc. for managing the web server and in installing scripts and additional services like web interfaces, e-mail, Control panels etc. There are a number of hosts that specialize in dealing with software services like e-commerce. However, larger companies that outsource the network infrastructure to the hosting company mainly use these options.
The reliability of web hosting and uptime
Hosting uptime denotes the time that the host is accessible through the Internet. There are a number of providers that say that they aim for 99.9% uptime but there are planned maintenance and server restarts at the hosting environments.
Usually the web hosting service providers claim that they provide 99 or 99.9% uptime. This however does not take into account the network downtime and only refers to the server being powered. The downtime can potentially be larger than the percentage that is guaranteed by the provider.
There are many providers that would tie the uptime and the accessibility in their service level agreement. This agreement however, does not contain the reduced costs and the refunds if the performance criteria are not met. It is hence advised that when you select a web hosting company you should be careful and read the terms and conditions properly.
Types of web hosting
There are different categories of web hosting that are mentioned below:
- Free web hosting service: This is a free service and sometimes comes as advertisement-supported web hosting.
- Shared web-hosting service: With this many web sites share the same server. Usually the domains might share a common pool of server resources, like CPU and the RAM.
- Reseller web hosting: This allows the client to web host himself. Resellers can function for single domains with any combination of these types of hosting, depending on the affiliated provider. These accounts vary greatly in size and at times have their own virtual dedicated server to a co-located server.
- Virtual Dedicated Server: Dividing a server into virtual servers. With this service each client feels that they have their own dedicated server but they would actually sharing a server.
- Dedicated hosting service:With this web hosting service every user gets their own web server and has full control over it. But the user does not own the server.
- Managed hosting service: Here the user gets their own web server but is not given full control over it. But with this service the user is allowed to manage their data through the FTP or other remote management tools. The user is not given full control so that the provider can guarantee the quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or create any configuration problems. The server is just leased to the client.
- Co-location web hosting service: This is similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the co-location server. The hosting company just provides the physical space that the server takes but would take care of the server themselves. This is the most expensive and the most powerful type of the web hosting service. In most cases for co-location, the client would have their own administrator visit the data center on site for the hardware upgrades or changes.
- Clustered hosting: They have multiple servers hosting the same material for better resource utilization.
Before you start looking for an web hosting provider you should know exactly what do you want. You should first of all determine what your web site is made of. It is very important that while choosing an affordable web hosting service you should work with your website developer.
If you have a small website with a few pages with text and not many pictures then you would need good speed and a decent all around the clock support. Websites that have videos, movies, pictures, animations, graphics, text and more of these things then they would require the web hosting provider to have software for tools or languages like ASP, PHP, MYSQL have been used to create the website besides the other necessities.
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