The basics of Web Hosting

Introduction

Having developed a website the next thing you need to do is make it visible to everyone else on the internet, which means selecting a web hosting service to publish your website. Whilst many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will allow you to publish your website for free - that might not always be the best solution to use. It all depends on your reasons for wanting to publish a website in the first place or what the website is to be used for. Hopefully you’ll find the following helpful in explaining to you what your options are and, in basic terms, what you can expect to get out of the different web hosting options.

The different types of web hosting services.

There are four main types of web hosting services you can consider. The first of these, as mentioned above, is using your ISP. To be quite honest the only advantage of using your ISP as a web hosting service is that it will allow you to publish a small website for free or at least it will be a cheap hosting option for you. The disadvantages of using your ISP are that it will almost certainly restrict the size of your website to 10MB or less and may well restrict your ability to have things like PHP scripts in it. However, the biggest drawback to an ISP web hosting is in the websites internet address, or domain name, that you are allowed to use. So, if you wanted a ‘catchy’ url like www.jdoe.com - expect to have to settle for something www.myisp.net/jdoe instead. Which might be fine for a personal site, but not if you want to seriously promote or sell something.
Most small companies, or people starting out developing a website, will usually use a shared web hosting service instead. A shared web hosting service simply means that your website is stored on a web server, a sort of computer publishing websites onto the internet, along with several other customers’ websites. You’re in effect renting space on a web server shared with other people. There are two main advantages to this method of web hosting: a relatively low cost and yet you can use any domain name that is available. So, if www.jdoe.com is available the web hosting provider will make sure that the host machine has a directory path to find it. You’ll also find lots of other options available to you such as whether to use UNIX or Windows based web hosting plans. (We’ll look at those two things again in other web hosting articles.)
Another alternative is to have a computer dedicated to holding and serving just your website. This is known as dedicated hosting, where the web hosting service gives you your own web server and can then guarantee you a minimum bandwidth through a dedicated communications line to it. Some web hosting services will also let you set up the web server entirely on your own. However, this is a complex task and most people opt for the web hosting company to set up the server for them.
The most expensive web hosting service you can buy in to is called co-location, or co-lo, web hosting. Here you will buy a web-server and locate it at a facility with access to a high speed hub. So far that’s not too dissimilar to dedicated hosting. However, in co-lo you have the option of using the web host’s telecommunications system or contracting directly by yourself with a telecommunications company of your choice.

Being your own web host.

You’ll find plenty of reviews about web hosting service companies to read on the internet; that will also allow you to compare the value for money that they can offer. With the possible exception of ISP web hosting all of the above options will require you to pay monthly or annual fees to rent the various level of facilities you chose from the web hosting company. However, there is one final option that you could consider. You could, of course, set up a computer of your own to act as the host to your website. All you need to be sure of is that you can have/register a static IP address and have a DSL connection, which usually has sufficient bandwidth for a website with up to 100,000 hits a day. However, setting up a web server will create security issues for you and; if you’re not already knowledgeable or qualified in web server technology, you’ll need to read a lot of articles about web hosting technology.