Web Hosting - A Guide for Beginners

So you're looking to learn about web hosting and what it has to offer or you may not know much about web hosting? There is no shame in not knowing this information. Everyone has to start at the beginning at some point. On that note, lets start to learn about web hosting.

First, what is web hosting and how does it work

Web hosting is the practice of the business of providing space and bandwidth on a high-powered computer server that is connected to the Internet at high speed. The accommodation maintain large computer networks web servers in a high-power known as a data center physical location companies. These servers are connected to a very fast Internet connection, and generally redundant. Data centers are the primary and backup power, a fast Internet connection, and a staff of security monitoring.

Web hosting companies provide a share of disk space and bandwidth available to a customer for a monthly fee. Once the client is signed, they can upload files to their personal space on the web server and the information is visible to anyone interested on the Internet. The monthly charges for the web hosting company charges is much less than it would cost to run a server on your own home or a data center running. This is why these companies exist. They take care of all the hardware, software and other technical needs for you.

Types of accommodation

There are many different types of accommodation on offer, but the main three are shared, reseller, and dedicated. Each type of accommodation has a different purpose.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of accommodation. Shared hosting is a portion of disk space and bandwidth provided to you by the web hosting company on a high-powered server. There are many other hosted on this server websites and the hosting company is likely to have a fairly large number of servers in a data center wide. Server resources are shared by many other sites that are assigned to this computer.

Shared web hosting is the best form of web hosting if you are looking for a great price and do not have more than a few thousands of daily visitors to your site.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller web hosting is a popular solution at low cost to start your own web hosting company. There are two types of reseller hosting, private label and reseller services.

The MDD is the best type of reseller plan because it allows you to keep full control over the websites of your customers. Private-label scheme allows the dealer to keep the full monthly payment of web-hosting customer, but the dealer must pay a monthly fee for the largest hosting company for the reseller space. Most accommodation is a private-label reseller can sell, the more profit for them. Private label hosting allows you to host many more sites if you use shared hosting for everyone. This is a great solution for someone who has many sites they need to host a place to save money.

The dealer service plans resell the regular web hosting plans of a large web hosting company, but you get a reduced price to provide customers and earn a monthly fee for as long as they remain a customer. This plan does not allow control over the websites of clients and you do not keep some of the potential monthly income.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated Web Hosting is the most efficient and economical solution hosting a busy without resorting to buying your own equipment and pay hundreds of dollars per month for a fast connection to the Internet website. The dedicated hosting consists of single server with anyone else hosting on this computer. This allows for more configuration options. Anyone who has a busy find dedicated hosting site is the necessary choice.

Web Hosting Considerations

Wonder about all the other information contained in the web hosting plans? In this section, I will explain the most important considerations in choosing a good web host.

Price

The price of web hosting services is one of the most important. There are many hosting companies out there with cheap hosting packages, but they may be lacking in other areas. Do not let the price of a hosting package fool you. There are some out there hosting companies that have great prices and other characteristics are just as good. The price can be one of the most important features of a web hosting plan decisions, but there is much more to consider in choosing a quality web host.

Disk Space / Storage Space

Disk space is the amount of physical storage space a web host gives you to store your files on the Web. The hosting companies these days have plans with disk space is measured primarily in terms of gigabytes, but some still offer plans in the megabytes of storage space. Depending on your needs storage of files, you may need more or less. In general, the more disk space available, the better.

Bandwidth / Transfer data tape

The amount of available bandwidth can make a big difference in choosing a quality hosting plane. In general, the more bandwidth a hosting company offers the better. This means you can support more traffic to your website as your business grows. Beware of web hosting that offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited companies. While many of them are legitimate offers, there are some out there who are overselling their bandwidth in the hope that the average user will not use much.

Customer Support

In any business, it is very important to provide exceptional customer service. Web hosting is no exception to this. Many hosting companies are available all day and night if you have a problem with your website, but there are some that are only available specific hours of the day. If your site goes down the middle of the night when they are not available, which means loss of income for a company. You must ensure that the web host you choose is always available for support.

Money back

Most web hosting companies provide a money back guarantee of thirty days. Some even provide a long, but be wary of those who offer no money back guarantee. I would not buy web hosting services from a company that does not offer at least a money back guarantee of 30 days, unless they have been proven to be a leader in the industry and have a excellent reputation.

Operating system

An operating system is software that controls the interaction between the user of the computer and the physical hardware of the machine. A large majority of all websites on the Internet run on the Linux operating system. Linux is generally much more stable than Windows. Stability is essential in the management of a website. For this reason, I prefer to host my web sites on the Linux operating system. Some sites have specific requirements that only the Windows operating system can only meet, but there are always alternatives to these requirements.

Protection

A good web hosting company will have a regular schedule to back up data on all Web servers. In most cases, the data is saved, the better. At the very least, a web hosting company should save the files of the web site every day.

Panel

The control panel is the point of contact the administrator of the website will be between the host server and their own machine connected via the Internet. It is essential to have a control panel interface well organized and easy to use. My favorite control panel is cPanel, which is one of the main panels of web hosting control there today. Plesk is another good, and many companies will create their own control panel that you can use. Most web hosting companies provide a link to a demo of the control panel they use with their hosting plans. The control panel used is a matter of preference, but it should be user friendly.

Email

Email is an essential part of communication on the Internet. Most web hosting companies out there will give you more e-mail addresses and more space to contain e-mail you will ever need. What you need to watch out for is companies that have decided to be a little more strict on their email accounts and only offer a small number or a small amount of space message.

Uptime

Availability is a term used to describe how often the average Web site hosted by a company is available online. Expect any company to provide 100% availability exact. This is possible due to things such as hardware, software, and power outages. A vast majority of companies are very good with availability, and not guaranteed. It is always a good idea to be aware of the uptimes posted by the company. If it is not at least 99.5%, it is probably not worth hosting with this company.

Statistics

As a webmaster, it is good to know how many visitors you had, where they come from, how long they stay on your site, and how much bandwidth they use. This information is collected by the web server and is placed in a log file. A statistical software reads this data and provide useful information to the webmaster. The information gathered from these logs can be very useful in improving service to viewers of the website.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is a way to get online quickly and downloading files to and from a web server. Most web hosting companies will allow their customers to access their web hosting accounts via FTP. FTP is very useful and a great feature to have when you pay for a web hosting account.

Scripting

Since the beginning of the World Wide Web, many scripting languages ​​were created and evolved in dynamic and interactive environment we enjoy today. A scripting language is a way to add functionality to a website, whether it be to calculate numbers or to load information from an external database. Scripting languages ​​have made electronic commerce possible. Some of these languages ​​include PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, VBScript, JavaScript, and Perl. I will not go into the details of these in this article for reasons of complexity. If you know how to use these languages, you should know what to look for in a web server for them.

Databases

A database is a place to store data that can be used in a variety of ways. The databases are used on the Internet for applications such as shopping carts, message boards and product catalogs. Other databases on the web hosting provider allows you to create, most applications that you can deploy on your web server. The databases are used by the most advanced web master, but the information is available online if you are interested.

Conclusions

Web hosting can be a very difficult decision with thousands of hosting companies out there. It is essential to find a plan that meets your needs and have a good hosting company. I hope this article has been helpful in your decision about which company to host with. Accommodation Holidays!