Web hosting is an important service provided by thousands of businesses around the world. It is essentially renting data storage space and bandwidth to people who have websites to publish. Web server provides powerful computers (servers) on which web pages are stored and from which anyone browsing the Internet can download pages from any website hosted there. You, as a website publisher, are paying the web host to use your computer’s disk space to store your website and for their bandwidth so your site visitors can download pages, images, etc. .
Every website needs to be hosted somewhere and there are a huge number of web hosting companies to choose from, offering a wide variety of options, from free hosting to plans that cost hundreds of dollars a month. Why the big difference? Because what is offered varies enormously. If you are a business with a website that has many hundreds of pages and thousands of visitors a day, you will need a host that can provide a lot of storage and bandwidth and is very robust and reliable. This inevitably costs money.
There are free hosting options available, which may be fine for experimenting or a small family and friends type site, but will never be appropriate for even the smallest business or remotely serious webmaster. In addition to limitations on the size and appearance of your site, you are unlikely to have your own domain name and will have little or no ability to influence any of the features of your site that should make it show up well in results. from the search engine. .
Web Hosting Definition – Reliability
One of the advantages of websites is that they can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is only true if your web host ensures that the servers that host your site are fully operational and online at all times. Some web hosting companies are far less than satisfactory in this regard, and it’s important to be able to verify this before committing to a hosting plan.
Most web hosts will offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means they promise to keep your site online and accessible 99.9% of the time. This is the minimum you should expect, so treat any host that does not offer this with caution. However, you should check if the hosting company has managed to keep this promise. Some of the more reliable ones will show you your uptime history monitored by a third party. Once you have a website up and running, organizations like InternetSeer provide a free service that monitors your site hourly to check that it’s accessible. They will then email you if there is a problem and send you regular reports.
Web Hosting Definition: Disk Space and Bandwidth
When looking at the various plans that web hosting companies offer, two of the most important things to consider are disk space and bandwidth. These are vital considerations because if you don’t select a hosting plan with the appropriate bandwidth and disk space for your website, your site may go offline for exceeding one of these limits. Disk space is directly related to the size of your website. It refers to how much space your site can occupy on the server’s storage disks, so it is related to how many pages it has, the size of these pages, the number of image files, etc. Bandwidth is about the traffic your site receives and is a measure of how much information (data) is downloaded from your site over a period of time. This data transfer is generally measured in Gigabytes (GB) per month. If you exceed your monthly bandwidth limit, your site could go offline without notice.
Many web hosting companies will offer hosting plans that give you ‘unlimited’ disk space and bandwidth. While this sounds perfect in theory, it’s worth checking what your definition of unlimited is. Providing disk space and bandwidth costs the host money, so they won’t be happy that it’s truly unlimited. What they generally mean is unlimited for a typical website in the plan category you choose. The usual exceptions would be for sites that involve gaming, streaming video/music, or storing thousands of large image files.
Web Hosting Definition – Server Types
The vast majority of websites are hosted on shared servers. In other words, your website is stored on the same computers as many other websites. By doing this, web hosts can keep their costs reasonable and problems rarely arise from this.
The alternative to shared hosting is dedicated hosting, which means that your website has its own server. It is unlikely that you will need dedicated hosting unless you have a major business that involves a very busy website. Dedicated hosting typically gives you the ability to specify the level of disk storage and bandwidth your site requires, and should come with a higher level of support. It may also be a suitable option if there are custom options you need for your website.
