Web Hosting
Web hosting is an internet service which allows individual or organizations to show case their website on the internet accessible via World Wide Web. Web hosting companies provides web space to individuals or organizations on the web servers they host. A web site needs to be hosted on a web server so that it can access by everyone over the internet monthly hosting. A web hosting company provides web, fast internet connection for web servers, security, backups, etc. To upload files (web pages) from your local computer to webhost we need a tool that can help in transferring a website. There are many tools available for uploading and downloading your web pages to and from web server. One of the most popular FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is FileZilla, it is a free FTP program; it is used for downloading and uploading of web pages into webhosting server. You just need to put a server name, username and password into the program to gain access.
Why do we need web hosting?
A web page is file that is written in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and translated by web browser. Website is a collection of WebPages; these WebPages are what make up the World Wide Web. Once a web page is designed, it is saved as a file on a computer. If the file remains on your computer, the only way anyone will see it is if opens your file at your computer where you have saved your file. So, in order to get the web page visible to anyone on the internet, you need to rent some space on a computer that specializes in serving files out across the internet. Once your website is developed, you need to transfer it from your local computer to the web hosting servers.
There are few things which should be kept in mind while opting for any of the hosting company:
How much space would be required for hosting your website, what kind of website you are building whether it is a static website or dynamic or any ecommerce website, what bandwidth would be required by your website you should also consider some of other additional hosting features like a plain HTML based website requires different resources compared to other dynamic websites that uses a database, special image libraries, and custom programming.
One important factor you should keep in mind while selecting web hosting provider is the Operating system on which the web server runs. The following are few of the operating systems used for running web servers:
• Windows
• Linux
• Unix
• Macintosh
Windows and Linux are the most favorable operating system because of their splendid features. If you want to host a website built on Microsoft technology, you should definitely go for windows web hosting on the other hand if your website is built on open source technology you should select Linux web servers. Always check whether the web server operating system is compatible with the technology used in your website.
There are different types of hosting available. The following are few of them:
Free web hosting:
Free web hosting is suited for those web sites which have low traffic inflow, for example a website for individual use. Mostly there is no technical support available. You cannot use your own domain name with free server hosting.
Shared web hosting:
In shared web hosting you share the web server with many other web sites. It is quite economical to use. You can use your domain name with this type of hosting. With shared web hosting you can use various applications like email, database, etc and technical support is provided 24 by 7 with shared hosting.
Dedicated web hosting:
Dedicated servers are quite powerful and secure, they are the most expensive. This kind of hosting mostly suits large organization like banks. In dedicated hosting single users has access to the web server.