What is Website Hosting?

Web hosting can be a little complex to understand sometimes. Consider this, you have a business and you need a place to sell your goods so you buy or lease a brick & mortar building. Without it you wouldn't have a place to display your products.

Web hosting is similar to this, you have a bunch of pages that make up your website but without a web hosting account you don't have a place for people to view your site.

Web hosting comes in a variety of ways with all sorts of features that you may or may not need. We list the main features to look for in a web host and given some recommendations as to reliable web hosting providers.

1. Support

Probably the most important part when it comes to choosing a hosting provider is support. You could have the greatest product and a hosting provider with all the bells & whistles but if you run into a problem you'll want a company that you can contact for support to get your site running again.

2. Diskspace

Diskspace is the amount of space you're allotted on a server to publish your website. Going back to our example of a brick & mortar business, it's like 3000 square feet building opposed to 1000 square feet. As you can see, the more diskspace your allotted the more you can publish to your hosting account.

With that said, depending on what you intend on doing with your website, a ton of diskspace doesn't make or break a hosting plan. Items that add up to use your diskspace are the number of pages, images, any video or audio. Often times hosting providers will also include your email storage as part of your total used so if you are getting close to your limit you may want to check your email account for any large attachments.

3. Bandwidth (Data Transfer)

Bandwidth is the amount of data that you can transfer between your site and people visiting it. You will sometimes hear bandwidth referred to as data transfer.

Again, the amount of bandwidth used is determined by the content of your website. If you simply have an informational site with a few images your not going to use nearly as much bandwidth if for instance you had a variety of videos on your website. A fair amount of bandwidth would be about 200gb per month.

4. Email Accounts

Majority all hosting providers that you select will offer email accounts with the hosting plan. This will allow you to have personalized email addresses such as you@yourdomain.com. This allows for a professional look along with the ability for brand and name recognition. Generally 10 email accounts will be sufficient. One important note to consider is web mail, this allows you to check your email from any computer with an internet connection without having to use an email client such as Outlook.

5. Uptime

Uptime is the percentage of time that a hosting provider claims that their server is online. You'll find that majority of the companies out there claim 99.9% which is standard because a hosting company can't guarantee 100% uptime due to unforeseen power outages and updates.

New to the market is "clustered hosting". This is a collection of servers that allows for very limited downtime. The idea is that if a server goes down in their cluster that one of the other servers will take over the traffic until the original server issue is fixed. As we mentioned, this is fairly new to the market so there are not to many providers offering this setup yet.

Web Hosting Features

Below you'll find some additional features offered by web hosting companies. We have listed a few of the more common ones that you may need in the future if not from the start.

1. PHP

PHP is a computer scripting language originally designed for dynamic web pages. The use for PHP would be such things as online shopping carts, forms, and a huge group of other scripts. PHP is an open source language so there is no proprietary software or hardware required. The alternative is ASP which is proprietary to Microsoft and runs on a Windows server.

2. MySQL

MySQL is a database management system and generally runs on it's own server to provide muti-access to users. Some common uses of databases are shopping carts, forms, etc. The database stores information in a certain format so that once the information is needed you can use PHP to retrieve the data.

Please don't let this intimidate you, more often than not you can find a simple script to install that creates the database structure for you and all you need to do is enter the information in a very easy to manage control panel.

3. Add-On Domains (Multiple Domains)

An add-on domain allows you to host multiple websites on 1 account. For instance, you choose a hosting account that allows you to add 5 add-on domains. This is saying that you can host a total of 6 different websites, each with completely different domains and information, on one account. There are no additional fees attached to your original hosting plan.

4. Additional Features

We have listed above some of the features that will vary from hosting company to hosting company. Some of the other features to look for are CGI, Perl, Ruby On Rails, etc. These are all various types of scripts. As you read through our website, you'll find that we have detailed information on each of these features.