A Beginners Guide to Web Hosting

 Just as the number of websites is staggering, so too is the number and variety of web hosting services. Every website needs a web host. The web host is the sites’ pathway to the internet. If you planning on starting a website, you probably need an introduction to the types of web hosts that are available to you.

A web host has a series of special and expensive computers, which are called servers. Web sites are loaded on the servers. Most sites share a server with other sites. This is the most cost effective and, works satisfactorily for most websites. As long as the web host keeps track of the server usage by each of the sites, then the system works well. The problem lies when one site on the system takes up too much of the server’s disk space or bandwidth, in which case all the sites located on the server can suffer from reduced performance.

Some websites will go to the extra expense of having a dedicated server. This simply means that the entire server is dedicated to one or more websites that you control. Very large sites fit into this category because they may be close to using a whole server anyway. Some sites are very complex, using many complicated pictures and film clips, which are a drain on a server’s resources. If combined with other websites on a shared server that are doing the same thing it can slow a server down. Still other sites need a higher level of control for security and reliability purposes.

There is a type of web hosting that is somewhere between the shared and dedicated server types. It is called VPS Hosting. Your website shares a server but has a fixed amount of space located on its own dedicated partition. This solves many of the potential issues with a shared server but is not as expensive as a dedicated server is.

Still another type of web host is called Managed Hosting. This simple means the web site is on a dedicated server but it is entirely managed by the web host, making this an expensive alternative.

One more web host category is Colocation.  Here the website actually owns, not rents, the dedicated server. However, to reduce costs, it shares certain of the web host’s resources.

There is much more to web hosting, of course. This is a brief introduction to the general types of web hosts available to you.