A Beginners Guide to Web Hosting
What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what
you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page
that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser.
In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And
a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images.
All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers
so that online users can visit your website.
Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need
to host your website on a web server. When your website
goes live on the web server, online users can then browse
your website on the Internet. Company that provides the
web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.
A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts
up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a
popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000
websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many
web servers (essentially, these are computers) to 'store'
the website. And all these web servers are connected to
the Internet through high speed Internet connection and
housed in a physical building called 'data center'. In order
to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully
operational all time, a data center is a physically secure
24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature
control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant
power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
What are the different types of web hosting?There are different
kinds of web hosting companies out there with different
characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized
into the following categories:
Shared Hosting
In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting),
many websites are sharing the space on the same physical
web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server
can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites
at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is
shared by so many websites, will the performance of the
web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually
equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can
support up to a certain number of websites without any problem.
But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable
number of websites that it can support, then you will begin
to experience a slower response from the web server.
However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider
will constantly monitor the performance of the web server
and will add new web servers when deem necessary without
sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a
physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing
power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting
provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price.
For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would
have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared
hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.
Dedicated Hosting
In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned
a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since
a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer,
the customer has the option to host single/multiple web
sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater
site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore,
dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically
starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500
per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used
by high traffic and extremely important website.
Co-location hosting
In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the
web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server
during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting,
the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed
their web server within the web hosting provider's secure
data center. In this way, the customer has full control
over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the
24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure
data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack
space required, typically co-location hosting range from
$500 - $1000 per month.
Reseller hosting
In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web
server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount
price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers.
Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers,
web developers, or system integration company who resell
the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their
other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive
up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account
from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed
to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its
own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting
company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans
under its brand).
To the reseller's customers, the reseller is the web host
provider. In cases when technical problems such as server
down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to
correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due
to the communication process taken place between customer
to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider
and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer
time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal
website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks
of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally
not a good option.
However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers
that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you
tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller?
You don't judge by the availability of toll-free number
alone because some web hosting providers even offer their
resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded
technical support. When the reseller's customer calls the
number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller's
name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from
the reseller directly. Likewise, don't be fooled by the
professional designed website alone because it is extremely
easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.
In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting
price and company information. In most cases, a genuine
web hosting provider has solid company information such
as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background,
offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually
do not have solid company background (here is just an example
out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price
by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle
for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers
offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price
ranging between $7 - $10.
Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web
hosting companies without first considering the quality
of the service and support provided. Don't expect to find
any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3
per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand,
by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you
can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web
hosting plans to host your important website.
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