Web hosting companies are plentiful these days. There are many to pick from and with so many choices available it can be difficult to decide which one is the best for you and your website. However, before committing to any one web host company, consider a few factors to help you make the best decision possible.
Budget
Whether you have a small budget or a large one, money is always a consideration. While there are many low budget hosting options available, there are also many that offer more robust and expensive features for those looking for the optimal services provided through their hosting company. By considering your budget and knowing how much you are willing to spend on hosting services you can easily weed out several hosting companies.
Services Provided
Before you pick any company, you should carefully assess what services and features you will need to support your website. If you need multiple e-mail addresses as well as ample amount of webspace and speed you should consider all of these factors. These features require special services that may only be provided through certain hosting companies. It is important to do this before you pick a hosting company because you do not want to end up paying for website hosting that ultimately doesn’t meet your needs.
Customer Reviews
Though you shouldn’t completely rely on customer reviews, you should consider what people are saying about the website hosting companies you are considering. Take the opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences whether they are professional reviewers or just average Joes who have used the website hosting company for their small personal websites. You may also learn of a few things that you didn’t think about before when reading through these reviews.
Consider Customer Service
This is particularly important if you are new to the website world. Get to know the customer service of the website hosting companies you are considering. Ask them some questions and see how they respond. If they are quick and courteous keep this in mind. If they don’t answer your questions in a timely manner, it’s not likely that will change after you make a commitment to them so keep that in mind as well.
Hidden Fees
Some companies offer what look like great promotions but forgo telling you that minor upgrades that are standard in other places will cost you more money. Make sure you are getting all the standard features you need included in the price they are offering or you may find yourself paying an arm and a leg for features that are included everywhere else.
There are many things to consider when picking a hosting company. However, you can learn how to easily navigate through the many choices by keeping in mind all of these factors and concerns. A well educated consumer is ultimately a happy consumer. Do your research, ask questions proactively and make sure you read all the fine print. If you do that, you will find the right company in no time.
Web Hosting – For The Beginners
What is Website Hosting
First of all, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should know what a website is. It’s simply a online destination that you visit for information or anything else that you need digitally. Therefore, website hosting is the hosting a websites or accommodation of them on servers that are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Website hosting or web hosting is directly resulted from Internet where computer networks are inter-connected thus all computers across the globe are accessible as a node from any of the rest of the computers. Internet is conceived by a protocol set called TCP/IP. It’s what every computer relies on to communicate with the others.
A computer is then connected the Internet, for what? There got be something that they can do with it or what’s the point of Internet? Typically, there are 2 sorts of computers on the Internet, namely servers and clients.
A client computer is what you use to surf the net, like the one you are currently using to browse this web page. You use it to search and fetch information you need on the Internet. That’s where the server kicks in. The information you found and downloaded is hosted on the server. Thus website hosting.
Everything we see, use and download is hosted on websites, from large chunk of texts to video slices or even web games. Websites are accessible via domains which are not the websites themselves. Domains are merely an address that’s devised for quick recognition and easy recalling. They are just pointing to the actual websites that are hosted on web servers.
So there you go. Website hosting is simply the operation of hosting websites on web servers so they are accessible via domains or URL addresses. Usually, a professional web hosting server is constantly connected to the Internet to keep the websites available so the visitors can use it any time they want. But there will be incidents that servers are forced offline thus down the websites hosted on it.
While big corporations, especially those relying on Internet to carry out businesses, has their very own data centers that have hundreds of physical servers to host their websites. For example, Microsoft.com, one of the most visited website in the world is hosted across multiple data centers to ensure up-time. Google.com, the undisputedly most successful Internet company thus far has hundreds of data centers across the planet.
Dedicated Server Hosting Contract
A dedicated server hosting contract is a major step up from a shared hosting account. With a shared hosting account your website is hosted on a web server along with hundreds of other web sites belonging to other customers of the hosting provider. This works fine for the average web site but if you have a large number of web site visitors or you need to run a script that requires system access outside the scope of the hosting providers terms then a dedicated server will provide you with the processing resources and control that you need.
The easiest way to explain what a dedicated server is and how it differs from shared hosting is to use the filing cabinet analogy. Think of the web hosting server as a filing cabinet. Your shared hosting account is like one of the files in the drawer of the filing cabinet. It exists in the same space as many other files, but is kept separated because it is in its own folder. This is how shared hosting works. There are many hosting accounts and each are enclosed in their own folder.
With a dedicated hosting account you have control over the entire filing cabinet. You have full access to the whole of the server and it is not shared with any other customer. The hosting service provides you with a complete server and you can use the server in any way you wish as long as you don’t violate the providers terms and conditions. If any of the hardware fails the hosting provider will usually carry out any repairs or maintenance at no charge to you.
There are two different types of dedicated hosting – managed and un-managed. With un-managed hosting it is entirely your responsibility to keep the server software up to date, ensure that the server is secure and carry out any periodic maintenance that may be required. Managed hosting provides varying levels of additional support from the hosting provider. This can include server monitoring where the hosting provider will be alerted if the server is unreachable and act promptly to rectify any problems.
The main advantages of a dedicated hosting server are the increase in resources (because you aren’t sharing them with anyone) and the extra flexibility with regard to what you can install on the server and how you can utilize it as a resource. With shared servers the hosting company has to be a little bit more cautious with what they allow you to install. This is to protect the other people who have hosting accounts on the server. These restrictions don’t exist with a dedicated server and as long as you’re not doing anything illegal you won’t be prevented from using the server however you see fit. As an example, I have several servers so I have them set up to act as backup servers for each other. Instead of having to back up onto the same server I have a remote backup for each one. I also run some custom scripts that require access to server utilities that wouldn’t otherwise be available.