Web Hosts: The Principles

Before you begin searching for a web host, you need to familiarize yourself with the terminology used in this area. The following terms are also considered key factors in deciding the suitable web hosting plan that meets your demands. You can start learning what does each time period mean and how does it affect your selection.

Hosting company

A web host, also known as net server, is a computer attached to the internet. This computer is more effective than normal PCs and is established up to serve up websites. Your web site content will dwell on this computer, which will give people who surf the internet a way to accessibility your website.

Web hosts can be categorized into main categories dependent on the price range and common features for each category:

1. Free of charge Hosts: limited in room, bandwidth and other features. Ideal for personal websites or for short-term usage. Usually enforce pop-up, text message or banner ads. They do not provide the very best performance and/or reliability. They offer minimum or no customer support. If you signup for a free host, your domain will be something like yourname.freehost.com or [http://www.freehost.com/yourname].
Two. Shared Hosts: most internet sites are using this type of hosting. Ideal for personal, small and channel businesses. Prices variety from $1 to about $25 a month. Features also range from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. Your site has its own top level area (e.g. [http://www.website-hostings.net]) The number of web sites on a server affects its performance and supply, more websites usually means less performance. Hosts hosting less number of shared websites are more expensive, nevertheless more reliable. Some companies permit customers to host several websites with different domains under a solitary account.
3. Devoted Hosts: A full host dedicated to a single customer. Usually used by large businesses and very energetic websites with thousands of every day visitors. The customer will certainly have full control over the host, and can create as many websites as he enjoys. Customer can have his own hosting company work on a rented dedicated host. Prices depend on the specs and services provided with the host, starting from about $100 up to about $800 dollars a calendar month.
4. Colocated Hosts: very similar to devoted hosts, but the buyer owns the server computer hardware instead of renting it. The server may be housed in provider’s data middle. Prices are a bit increased than dedicated servers.

Space / Storage space
The amount of web server’s drive space available for customer’s internet site files, images and listings. It can be as small as 5MB in some free hosting companies and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Room prices reduced significantly during the last few years.

Databases
As you have seen in server types, there are different types of sources. The most commonly used is mySQL because its an free GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ specifications such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, however, has some limits in its features. Complicated large business sites may need more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Machine.

Email
Most web hosting plans include the function of having some email accounts with customer’s site. The number and size of email options depends on the hosting program. Free plans do not usually have this feature, small plans give about 10 accounts where big programs do not limited the number. Those email options are usually web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

Control Panel
Nearly all hosting companies provide their consumers with a control panel, a web based request that helps in managing sites. Common functions in control panels are: managing email options, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, taking care of domains and subdomains and managing databases. The most commonly used control panel program is cPanel. Some companies develop their own cpanel application.

Uptime
An important feature of web hosts is their uptime, which is usually measured in percentage. A server that goes down for an average of 30 minutes a morning will have an uptime portion of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most tiny to medium business internet sites. Anything less than this percentage is not suitable for an organization website. Mission crucial sites cannot tolerate regular outages, thus they may use internet monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an disruption happens.

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