Beginners Overview of Web Hosting
If you are new to the whole online game just the thought of buying web hosting can be intimidating. Use this quick overview to relieve your fears and increase your confidence so that you can easily register with a hosting company with a clear head.
What Does Web Hosting Mean?
Any website is just a large collection of files made up of data, images, html documents, videos and more. All of these files must ‘live’ somewhere and need to find a “host’. Enter the website hosting company.
What is a Domain?
A domain is simply the address of your website. Just as your home address is a street number and name. Your website URL is made up of letters and numbers followed by a dot extension. With com, org, and net being the most popular choices.
Types of Web Hosting.
Now this is where things can get a little confusing. When it comes to the actual hosting of your site you have lots of different hosting choices.
There are four main choices which are:
1. Shared
2. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
3. Dedicated
4. Cloud A hosting solution can be compared to a storage place for your website. It will come with different storage levels, server speeds, reliability and technical aspects.
The Shared Server is where you are sharing space and resources with lots of other websites. All of these resources are not shared equally and sites can easily go over their limits and cause all of the sites on the server to go down.
A Virtual Private Server is one that is divided equally and shared by fewer websites. All resources are allocated in equal portions to each account. It is still possible to exceed your limits if you experience sudden spikes in traffic.
A Dedicated Server is where you are effectively renting out the entire server for your own sites. This type of plan is more expensive and offers you greater control over your website. Normally recommended for high traffic and large businesses.
Cloud hosting offers the ability to handle those traffic surges on your website. This type of hosting involves lots of servers, called a cloud, to work together to host multiple websites. As resources are needed a new cloud is added to handle the volume. This additional cloud is then released when the surge or spike is over.
The next time you look at hosting plans you will now understand what the different packages mean for you. The most common type for those hosting their first site is the Shared type of hosting plan.
