These days the web has become the source of everything from shopping, travel to learning. To be competitive in any business it’s advisable to have your own website. This therefore means that everyone should have some information about web hosting. With the correct information, you can easily choose the best hosting method.
For fresh starters it’s important to learn the meaning of every term used. You will be surprised how common words change to mean different things in the ‘web world’. For instance, web host refers to a computer that is connected to the internet at all times. This web host is superior to your ordinary computer so that it can be able to store website owners’ content and avail it to people who are surfing. There are different categories of web hosts.
There are free hosts who provide free services to those people who make websites for pleasure or other reasons that are not professional. Free hosts are also appropriate if you want to have a website only for a temporary period. The major disadvantage of free hosts is that the bandwidth allocated and the hosting space is very small. It’s also not very reliable since there is no customer support and usually includes a lot of banner advertisements and pop up text. Perhaps the biggest turnoff for many people is that when using a free host your domain name must include the word free, which can be damaging to your reputation.
There are also dedicated hosts. This is the opposite of free hosting with regard to reliability. Each customer is provided with a single server to serve all his or her needs. With this type of hosting you have control over your server therefore you can even run multiple websites at the same time. This type of hosting is best suited for professional companies whose websites serve thousands of people daily.
For small companies as well as individuals who do not want to spend a lot of money on web hosting you can opt for shared hosting. In shared hosting there are semi dedicated servers therefore, it is better than free hosting. However since it is shared by many websites performance is not optimal. This also means that if there are few websites to be hosted the charges will be a bit higher.
Other web hosts provide their customers with server storage before reselling them to another company. These are known as reseller hosts. In all these types of web hosting, the client usually rents the hosting software. There are special cases where the client owns the server hardware, which is placed in the provider’s data centre. This type of hosting is known as collocated hosting. It is very similar to dedicated hosting in terms of reliability but it’s more expensive.
Once you have established the type of hosting that is most appropriate for your needs the next step is to find out the server type your host uses. By server type, we mean the operating system used to run the web host. Common server types include windows, which runs ASP and http://ASP.NET and Linux which runs CGI and PHP. With this information, approaching the subject of web hosting should be much easier.
Author Resource:
Dhruv Patel is a customer of DreamHost. He has created site to help new DreamHost customers and to promote DreamHost by giving DreamHost coupon. You can check his website at http://ahappycustomer.dreamhosters.com