The Beginner's Guide to Web Hosting

? What is web hosting

Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your site on a web server. When your site goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of Web sites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For this reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to 'store' the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet via a broadband Internet connection and housed in a physical building called 'data center'. To ensure that all web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 with protection against fire environment, HVAC temperature control, virus detection, saving computer data, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

 What are the different types of web hosting

There are different types out there web hosting companies with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting name), many websites share space on the same physical web servers. According to the host, a physical web server can host hundreds to even thousands of different sites at the same time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of sites that can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, reputation and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the Web server and add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (disk space, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting will accept the response time of the slow server. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $ 5 - $ 20 per month.

Dedicated Hosting

Unlike shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used by a single customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to a single customer, the customer has the ability to host multiple single websites /, modify the software configuration, handle more site traffic and scale the bandwidth required. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $ 50 per month and up to $ 200 - $ 500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.

Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to Web providers and hosting customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and finds its Web server in the secure data center's web hosting provider. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 monitoring of the server and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $ 500 - $ 1000 per month.

Reseller hosting

In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third parties (ie reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web as a service added accommodation to complete their range of other services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent off the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling hosting plans Web under its brand).

For clients of the dealer, the dealer is the web hosting provider. In case of technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer and dealer distributor actual provider of hosting and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer to resolve. Unless you use your own website or website nonprofit and willing to take the risks of poor support from reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So how can you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You do not judge by the availability of toll-free only because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the customer calls the number of the dealer technical assistance, the host uses the reseller's name so the customer thinks that the support comes from the dealer directly. Also, do not be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a business web site look professional today.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has information from a solid company like iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just one example of the thousands out there). Moreover, the price of accommodation by resellers is generally below $ 5 per month. So why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality accommodation in a residential prices ranging from $ 7 - $ 10