Web Hosting An Introduction

Building a Web Site

You can build a very basic web site with a simple word processing program such as FrontPage or basic html codes. Then after you've built your web site, you'll need to find a way to publish it if you intend for it to be accessible on the World Wide Web. For this you'll turn to a web hosting company.

A web host will provide you with the disk space, services,and tools you'll need when creating a website on the Internet. While occasional technical problems are inevitable, competent web hosting companies will ensure your site is up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can find your web site at any time of the day.

To make your website available to the internet community, the website files need to be hosted on a web server. A web server is a powerful computer, which can accommodate thousands of requests for your website pages. A web server has to be connected to the internet all day and night so that users can access it anytime. A web hosting provider is a company that sells space on these web servers to website owners like you. They provide a full-time, high-bandwidth connection to the internet, so that visitors can access your site easily.

Reasons for not hosting a website on your home computer:

1. Server and server software (web server, mail server, firewall, virus protection etc.) can be expensive.

2. The server needs a 24/7 high speed connection to the internet, which is relatively costly.

3. Setting up all the configurations including mail server, FTP server and DNS server can be complicated.

4. Server maintenance requires 24 hour support, special skills and knowledge.

Now-a-days web hosting is very cheap (usually starting from under GBP5/month) due to intense competition in the web hosting industry. There are free web hosting companies also, however, they are not recommended for professional or company websites. The free web hosts will recover their costs by showing ads on your website, and provides less flexibility in terms of having your own domain names and email addresses.

Many Hosting Choices

There are literally tens of thousands of web hosting companies to choose from so finding one of the very best web hosting companies can be challenging.

Prices range from free to hundreds of dollars a year for personal web hosting and small business web hosting all the way up to hundreds of dollars per month for Ecommerce web hosting for large online businesses.

The best web hosting companies offer a wide variety of web hosting services all of which can be confusing if you're new to web site hosting.

How to choose the best web hosting Company
If you are looking for a new web hosting company then you must be getting a lot of offers from various hosting companies. Its quite difficult to decide a suitable. Here are few to know about potential web hosting companies:

1. Assess your needs - This is one of the crucial parts of determining your Web Host, assess what you need, not everyone needs a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server right off the bat. A majority of bloggers begin their web hosting journey with a Shared Hosting service.

2. Support and Scalability - When choosing a host for your blog it is a good idea to ensure that they provide good support and that their services are scalable. Test their support by sending emails and see how long it takes before they reply, do they give you an option at the end of the reply mail to answer further questions?, did they answer your questions well enough?.
A plus point for a hosting company is if they provide you with good support via 24 hour email, forum, live chat , etc.
By scalability i mean do they allow you to "grow"?, some hosting company only offer shared hosting services and this could be a pain if your blog starts to blossom and you discover that 5GB bandwidth a month is not going to be enough anymore, a good hosting company would normally also have a VPS and Dedicated Server plan so that moving your blog to a better server won't be that much of a pain, trust me sometimes moving a blog from one hosting company to another can really be a nightmare is it doesn't go well.

3. Do Your Research - Just because someone on a forum somewhere said a particular host provides good services doesn't automatically means that the you should host your blog with them.
Search online, get reviews and feedback, search for all types of hosts.

4. Beware the "unlimited" ploy - Stay away, in fact run as far as possible from hosting companies that promises you 'unlimited' space and 'unlimited' bandwidth.
There simply is no such thing as 'unlimited', everything has it's limitations. This question has been going on and on for some time now and i can tell you honestly there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, it's just part of their marketing tactics. However you will also come across the term "unmetered" and there is a difference between unlimited & unmetered
Unlimited means there is virtually no limit, which is frankly impossible. Unmetered means that you will not be billed for any extra bandwidth being transferred but you still technically have a limit depending on the type of port connection you are on.

5. Control Panel - This is quite important too, choosing a good control panel is essential to your overall hosting experience especially if you're a complete beginner and know almost nothing about web hosting.
I have had the luxury of using three main control panels before: Plesk, Direct Admin & Cpanel.
Out of the 3 listed above i can say that i have found that Cpanel is the control panel for me, mainly because of the cool feature that normally comes bundled with it - FANTASTICO.
Fantastico is a commercial script library which automates the installation of web applications to a website. Fantastico scripts are executed from the administration area of a website control panel, which basically means that installing Wordpress is as easy as pie.

6. Uptime - After figuring out all of the above and you start rolling out your blog the last thing you need is for it to crash every hour or so, keep track of your hosts uptime to ensure that your blog stays online (if possible) 100% of the time, most hosts will promise you 99% and that's fair enough actually.

7. The $$ Factor - I saved this for last because often times most bloggers who are looking for a host will tend to check out the price of the hosting and miss out everything else.
"Ask not what your host can do for you, ask how much?"
Don't ever follow that rule, it's really not a good idea to get a hosting service based on price alone, always remember that you get what you paid for!.
Along the years i have seen many of my friends suffer alot because of this, i too had an experience with this issue way back in 2004 when i chose a dirt cheap host that eventually went missing which meant that i lost my site and whatever files i had stored in there, looking back at it now it was quite a funny experience but it won't be funny if your running a successfully blog only to see it disappear overnight.