WEB SITE HOSTING SERVICES
Web site hosting service basically provides the space for the website on its server to have it available online for rest of the world to view.
Importance of Host – Web Site Hosting
Hosting your website yourself is a very expensive proposition as you will have to purchase infrastructure like servers, routers etc. So it is a normal in website hosting business to acquire service of hosting service providers who can host your website on their server with round the clock of internet connectivity.
You are provided with administration panel to control and manage your website by these web site hosting companies.
Listed below are several kinds of hosting options available:
Shared hosting
Dedicated hosting
VPS or VDS (Virtual Private Server & Virtual Dedicated Server)
Based on your budget, requirements and expectations from website you can select which is best for you. these options good for sites that need lotof resources or sites with lotof traffic .
Web Site Hosting – Shared Hosting — Free
If your website is a personal one you have no or very less intention of doing business with it, then you may opt for free web site hosting plans. So if you are new to website business, not expert technically and working on a new idea and of course tight on budget, then it only makes sense to go for the free plan. On the down side, such website hosting company hardly provides service to write home about.
The free option is always limited due to very few customization options and limited space and bandwidth. which can feel jammed. It can’t always provide the backend software support that you seek, like MySQL DB and PHP. Web statistics and other features are also poorly managed.
Shared hosting – Paid
Mostly the companies from average to large enterprise use some kind of shared web site hosting options. Mostly the needs are not that much to raise the need of dedicated hosting. Other than that like always cost is a big factor here as well.
Paid web hosting option grants you access to many useful features including (but not limited to) emails server, Software such as MySQL & PHP are supported. Generally security is not strong, making websites vulnerable against hacker attacks.
Dedicated hosting
For website of great magnitude with requirement of more space and bandwidth, dedicated web hosting is advisable. This options gives even more better administrative control to you. You are free to use any software, feature, components of your choice. However you need to have sound technical expertise to actually manage and get benefit from your dedicated servers. This is obviously an expensive option.
Co-location
Co-location is a variant of dedicated web hosting. In this model the server is all yours. However it is physically located at some service provider’s location. Still the server is only for you and your requirements. Of course the cost is high.
VPS or VDS
In this kind of web hosting, the server is divided into virtual partitions, which are quite similar to the drives created from your computer’s hard disk. Then, each partition is grant the ability to host a website. Every website owner have the options similar to dedicated hosting. But in reality the owner is only administrator of his/her virtual partition of server.
I hope this beginners guide would have helped you in clearing your basic concepts about web hosting and different types of hosting.
