Saturday, June 18, 2011

A Web Hosting Guide

By Matt Ewing


To expand the field of your business world, setting up a website for making your business a part of the online world of business, is definitely an aspect of paramount significance. Having consolidated the foundation, you; fancy of having a domain name and then follow the idea of finding web hosting for the purpose of the website you're going to have. Primarily, you start thinking about the suitable web hosting that can help you. So, let me begin with the ABC of this world of web hosting.

What is web hosting?

Although getting the domain name may be the first consideration, consideration has to be offered to the ability to what a website really is. Basically, the images, texts and graphics that a person sees on their screen is a bunch of file that are combined by a code consisting of HTML. Having compiled your files, they need to be stored somewhere to enable people, as long as they have access to the internet, to see the site. This is where the web host comes in and it can be described as space rented on a server. The role of the web server is to allow a computer to obtain the files that have been stored. Another task is that it provides the requested files to a computer which can then display the website. This delivering makes the name server akin to a waiter who serves the public in a restaurant.

Many services come with a web server. It can generate email addresses on the back of your domain name so others can communicate with you. It can also allow your site to show videos, run programs, maintain and create databases and a lot of other tasks which can be of great benefit. The software is key to this and is more important than the computer when making a server.

I don't need to say that the monthly payment you make after purchasing a web hosting is needed for the purpose of maintaining and upgrading the server's hardware and software. It also includes the charge of keeping it online all the time in a secure data center with the aid of a fast Internet connection, and the payment of the people who are doing all these. One can surely roll his or her computer into a web server as soon as it is decided but the idea of entrusting a dedicated person (for this job) with this job is often a better and reasonable one. It requires you to pay that person but it is ideal if the person does it in a reliable manner.

Varieties of Web Hosting

Shared Hosting- Websites are usually targeted to a particular section of people for a particular purpose unlike the sites like Yahoo! (Meant for everybody using Internet). So, they don't have thousands of pages or files. This point towards the fact that websites, in general, don't need the entire globe of resources of a web server. Let me tell you then that usually the Web servers are capable of handling hundreds of websites at once because they are powerful machines. Over 95% of all websites follow the model of shared hosting that refers to the concept of hosting more than one website on a particular server. Shared hosting is undoubtedly inexpensive as compared to the other types because it not only shares resources of the server among the clients but also the cost. This also contributes to its popularity. Shared hosting (also called virtual hosting) lets each client have a certain amount of each resource. The payment levels vary in accordance with the varied amounts of resources like disk space, bandwidth, email addresses, and many more.

Dedicated Hosting- When you feel the need of having lots of visitors for your big website or you think about dominating resources or feel antipathy towards sharing the server with anyone else who might crash it, you need a web server that is entirely dedicated to you. So, dedicated hosting is all about renting the service of an entire server. Ownership of machine and responsibility for maintaining the hardware and the web hosting software still remains in the realm of the web hosting company but you gain control over the configuration and use of the server. Semi-dedicated hosting is another interesting term where a web server extends service to 2-4 clients with a strong line of demarcation between them. This is also treated as managed hosting for here hosting company maintains the server. Having clarified all the ins and outs, it goes without saying that dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared hosting.

Server Co-Location- If money was no object, a great option is to contain everything within your own web server and domain and this can be done by buying a server and looking after it yourself. However, there are many issues that can arise from this and would you be able to react to power shortages, natural disasters, floods, break ins, staff error and many other problems that may cause problems? All of these issues may prevent your server from running on a speedy internet connection but help is at hand from a data center. Placing your server in a secure outlet with a guaranteed power source and reliable and fast internet connection is called a Co-location. This situation placed the client in charge of maintaining the software and hardware needs of the server as the data center will not become involved in this issue. If a client has the talent, ability and hours to look after this form of server, it can be an improved and less expensive variant compared to dedicated hosting.

UNIX Hosting- Although a number of web host styles have been talked about so far, it is more accurate to say they have been variants on UNIX as this is what the majority of web severs are operated on. The UNIX operating system was developed by universities as a method of providing access to networks and servers and features in many different forms and designs. This is because this form of operating system was created with 'open source protocol' which enabled many amendments and adjustments to be made. There are a great number of variations produced such as FreeBSD, SuSE, Debian and Red Hat Linux all of which stem from Linux and BSD, which are considered to be the popular versions. A huge benefit of using UNIX as a form of hosting is its low cost and the fact that it provides a better alternative to many operating systems. This reduction in costs allows the web host to charge a lower price for their service or allows them to have a larger profit margin. Other benefits in using this style of hosting platform is that the UNIX is considered to have high security, it is considered extremely powerful and it offers great stability. You may hear the phrase 'UNIX hosting' used quite a lot and this is because it refers to any platform that originated from the first UNIX.

Windows Hosting- Windows Server 2003 is a commercial product developed by Microsoft. As far as this product is concerned, an operator needs to purchase a license that raises the cost of entire process and gives birth to higher hosting prices. This special version of Windows operating system advanced by Microsoft is less powerful and secure than UNIX instead of Windows being deemed as perfect for users if you are to operate in a network environment. ASP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion are well-liked for some web programming applications and these scripting languages can only run on a Windows server like the Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access database programs. The idea of using all these requires you to have a Windows host.




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