Over the years internet has grown into one of the most popular media offering a plethora of services. More and more people are using the internet space to provide their goods and services. Through this system, people can attract great amount of customer around the world. Further, this has increased the demand for web hosting. Hosting is the process locating one’s site online and is performed by host companies or providers. The hosting providers keep the website on the servers with permanent connection to the Internet and this makes the website available and viewable.
However, it might come to your mind why do you need to host the site at the hosting company. This happens, as you cannot host the website on your personal computer, as it would be impossible to locate the site on Internet. Obviously, you would like to have a 24×7 site, but a PC is not compatible for such a task. Whereas a hosting provider would provide you with large hard disks, strong processors, wide memory store and fast connection that would boost your services.
How to obtain hosting
There are several paid and free providers of web hosting services, as a part of Internet access plan. The type of applications you require will determine the sort of hosting you need. Linux-based web hosting is widely used by the hosting companies, as it offers different types of software. The LAMP platform – Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python, is one of the widely used configurations with Linux server. Other services such as databases or multi-media services for streaming media or email for their business domain might also be availed by the web-hosting client.
Windows can also serve as the hosting platform. You can choose the Perl, Python and PHP for it. In addition, you can also choose Classic ASP or ASP .Net. Mac OS X provides a Unix like interface through Terminal.app that supports the Apache. These systems are equipped with complete web-hosting capabilities and supports Perl, PHP and Shell scripts.
For web hosting, you do not need to be acquainted with the technical aspects, as the Web hosting packages are accompanied by Web Content Management System. Average users might be satisfied with the Web Content Management systems; however, those who want more control over the website design need features that are more advanced.
It would be better for you to search the Internet to get the webhosting forums and message boards, which would offer details on the type of web hosting company.
Types of hosting
There are different types of hosting such as shared, collocation, dedicated that may be either free or paid. Take a look at the different types of hosting services:
- Free web hosting service - These are free of charges, however such hosting is often accompanied by advertisement. Unlike paid hosting free hosting is limited.
- Shared web hosting service - This service allows only a single site to be placed on the server with other sites. There may be hundreds or thousands of such sites. The different domains might share a common pool of server recourses like the CPU and the RAM. Further, you might also host the shared with a reseller.
- Dedicated hosting service - This is one of the most compatible web hosting services. Dedicated hosting allows you full control over your own web server. For Linux it allows root access and for Windows it offers administrator access. This does not imply that the user owns the server.
For cheaper options, you have the Self-Managed or Unmanaged dedicated hosting. In this case, the user has full administrative access to the box and so the client has to take the responsibility of security and maintenance for the dedicated box.
- Reseller web hosting - In this type of hosting, client can become web hosts themselves. The resellers are allowed to function for individual domains under the combination of these listed types of hosting. It also depends on those affiliated with the provider.
It enables the client to become web hosts. Depending upon the provider they are affiliated to the reseller might function for individual domains under any type of hosting. The size of resellers accounts might different. In some cases, they have a virtual server dedicated to the collocated server.
- Virtual Dedicated Server - In this service the server are divided into virtual servers where each user seem to have their own dedicated server. However, the users are actually sharing the server with other users. As a user, you can only root access your own virtual space. It is sometimes referred to as virtual private server or VPS.
Collocation web hosting service
This is somewhat similar to dedicated web hosting. The only difference is that the user owns a collo server. The physical space needed to host the server is provided by the hosting company, which also takes care of the servers. However, this sort of hosting is quite expensive and powerful. Generally, the collocation provider does not provide much direct support for the user’s machine. It only provides the Internet access, electrical and storage facilities for servers. Further, in case of collo, the clients have their own administrator that can access the data center to upgrade the hardware or for any other changes.
Clustered hosting
For better utilization of resources, this system uses multiple servers hosting. These types of servers are ideal for creating a scalable web hosting solution or a solution for high-availability dedicated hosting.
Home server
In this type of hosting, a single machine with consumer-grade broadband connection in a private residence plays host to one or more websites. These machines are either built for acting as servers. Sometimes the old PCs are also used. However, difficulties often crop up when ISPs try to obstruct home servers by stopping the incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user’s connection and does not provide a static IP addresses.