How Hosting Works

You have a conception that you desire to convert into a web page? Your first step should be to retain your enthusiasm and discover a place for your page online so that it will be always available for the whole world to see.

Where should you host your site?

Since the number of web sites online has increased rapidly in the last few years, the demand for web hosting services has also lead to the birth of countless hosting suppliers. These are companies that offer you disk storage space for your own web page on their servers.

Types of web hosting services

The scope of hosting services fluctuates vastly, so do the demands of the web site possessors. The most basic hosting type is the small-size file hosting solution, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web-based web hosting Control Panel. A lot of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer this service free of cost. Personal website possessors and corporations can also obtain web hosting services from different web hosting distributors. Personal website hosting services are typically either free, advertisement-supported, or inexpensive. Business website hosting services normally are more expensive, but because of the great competition on the web hosting market, an escalating number of hosting distributors, like us at Web Hosting For Life, provide business website hosting services at cheap prices and with flexible invoicing intervals.

Types of websites and their requirements

The free-of-cost website hosting solution is normally sufficient for personal web sites such as portfolios or blogs. A more resource-devouring web site, like a community web portal or a corporate web page, requires a more advanced hosting platform that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP). If you desire to create an e-commerce website, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the hosting distributor of your choosing. As of now, SSL certificates are furnished by most hosting vendors.

The web hosting Control Panel

The web hosting supplier typically also offers a web hosting Control Panel user interface for managing your web content, e-mail boxes, email aliases, domain names, DNS records, and so on.

Service reliability

When choosing a hosting vendor, website accessibility is a very important factor. The availability of a web site is estimated on a yearly basis by taking into consideration the time when the website is publicly available and viewable on the World Wide Web. Network and service uptime guarantees, therefore, should be mindfully considered when signing up for a website hosting plan. The best thing to do is double-check the SLAs and the ToS of the web hosting services provider of your choosing in advance. Finding online reviews from current customers is also a quite good step before you make up your mind to subscribe.

The shared web hosting solution

The most popular and modestly priced type of web hosting service is the shared web hosting solution. It includes 24/7 support, which is a great asset for clients who do not wish to cope with server maintenance procedures, but could also obstruct customers who would like to exert more control over the hosting server. For such users, a VPSs or a dedicated packages would be more appropriate. Most popular apps and scripts work okay on a shared hosting server. Besides, the shared web hosting solution is cheaper than other types of web hosting solutions, such as the dedicated hosting, since the web hosting accounts provider divides the shared web hosting server among numerous customers. The shared web hosting solution normally involves system resource usage restrictions that ensure that the different customers do not interfere with each other and that the hosting server remains stable.

Managing your shared hosting account

Shared website hosting plans usually offer a web-based web hosting Control Panel graphical user interface, such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, etc. The majority of the large hosting service providers, again like us at Web Hosting For Life, use their own personal custom-designed Control Panel user interface.

Server maintenance

With the shared website hosting platform, the hosting solutions provider is responsible for managing the web and email servers, for installing server software, software updates and patches, and for offering tech support to its customers. Most web servers are based on the Linux OS. The hosting service provider's sysadmins are responsible for keeping the Operating System up to date, unless you have a dedicated hosting server and complete server root access.