Every website you have ever clicked onto through your computer, tablet or mobile phone is ‘hosted’ on the internet, but what does that mean, and how do you go about getting a host for your new website?

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web.
– Wikipedia listing for Web Hosting Service

When you visit a website the data you are looking at is stored on a computer somewhere in the world, this computer is similar to the one you may have at home, in fact you could host a website from your home computer, but if the computer gets turned off, or encounters any technical issues that cause it to crash or falter, your website will be offline.

Have you ever tried to access a site and received a server error telling you the page cannot be loaded?

This means the computer hosting the site has failed — such technical problems are usually resolved very swiftly by a good web host.

So how do get a website hosted, we hear you ask? 

You go to a hosting provider, who will usually maintain a large ‘bank’ of many servers, and pay them to give you an agreed amount of space on one of these computers to store your website.

Their job is then to maintain the servers, fixing them if they break down and keep your website online to the best of their ability.

What Makes A Server Special?

Web hosting servers are not so different to your home desktop computers, but they have a number of small changes to optimise them for the job they do. Stability is hugely important; you want your server to be ‘online’ without interruption as much as possible.

Because of this a lot of web servers run the operating system Linux, because it is considered more stable than a Windows computer and is more suited to the web hosting environment.

In fact Google uses more than 15,000 Linux servers to host it’s search engine content.

Servers have many of the same key components you will be familiar with as a home desktop user.

They have an amount of storage which determines how much ‘web space’ they can offer to the sites they host, they have RAM which allows them to run smoothly and they have software installed on them which enables the websites held within to operate more complex features.

Shared Hosting Vs. A Dedicated Server

Web hosting can be expensive for larger sites which handle a lot of traffic; shared hosting is a way of bringing down the cost of hosting your website. With a shared hosting account (also called virtual hosting) your website will sit on a single computer along with other websites.

Each website hosted on the server is sharing the cost of keeping that server running, so the amount you pay is considerably less.

If you are starting out with your first website then shared hosting is a great way to get up and running at low-cost, you can also scale up as you go (providing your hosting company allow this), so if you are not sure how much web space you will need you can start small and add more as your site grows.

Shared hosting technology is very secure, however it is worth remembering that with this kind of shared server access, if another website on your server is infiltrated by a hack or virus, this may also affect your site indirectly.

Large sites that receive a high volume of traffic, or contain a huge volume of data, will run on one or more servers of their own, this is called dedicated hosting. When a website has a server all to itself this can make it load faster, gives you considerably more web space & bandwidth to play with plus more flexibility when customising server software packages.

However, you will be covering the cost of running the server entirely, so this is a more expensive option.

Dedicated hosting costs more, but offers more features and benefits. With dedicated hosting, you’re the only site on the server and have your own IP address. A dedicated IP address used to be a requirement for SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption, but some hosting companies now offer it as part of virtual hosting packages.
– Souce: netmechanic.com.

Welcome back to our guide on the basics of web hosting. In part one we looked at what web hosting is and the differences in server options. In this final part of our introductory guide we start by looking at what you should expect to get for your money.

What to Expect As Standard

The following are often included with any basic level of paid web hosting:

Control Panel Access: You will be given access to your hosting package to maintain and manage it, depending on the control panel your hosting company offers (Cpanel is a very common control panel) this can contain many useful free features; including web traffic reports, bandwidth reports, web space stats and email management.

Email addresses: Your domain will have a limit to the number of @mydomain email accounts you can create, but you should expect some (normally 10–50) to be included in any basic hosting account.

You can then purchase extra accounts if required.

Backups: It is usual for a web hosting to run scheduled backups (usually once a day) or your website on a paid plan, which is good for peace of mind, but you should also make sure you have a local backup which you have access too should you wish to move the site to a new server.

FTP Accounts: FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a standard used for uploading files to a hosting server. You will get at least one account you that can use to access your space, additional accounts will enable you to give other users access, without having to share your account details.

You can restrict additional user’s access so they can only manage a section of your web space if required.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet.
– Wikipedia.com, File Transfer Protocol.

Web hosting products you may need to pay for

When you purchase web hosting you will be presented with many packages, tiers of quality and add-ons which will incline in price. Let’s take a look at some of the most common elements of any web hosting package and assess what you might need.

Web space: This is the physical space that your website will sit on, think of it like space on your computer for storing files, or space on your iPod for holding songs.

However it is important to remember that everything you put online has to be downloaded by the viewer through their internet connection, this means web content is optimised to be smaller in size.

The amount of space you require will depend on what you want to do with the site, for example a basic ten page website with text and optimised images should not exceed 20mb, if you want to host video and large downloads you are going to require more space.

Bandwidth: Bandwidth (or data transfer) is important, think of it like data usage on your phone, if you run out before the end of the month your website can be cut off and will not be live again until the next billing period (or you will have to pay extra, depending on your arrangement with your web host).

Bandwidth is used every time someone visits your site and loads the content on it — a normal text and image based website will need many thousands of viewers to use a couple of gigabytes of data, but a video streaming website like Youtube.com will use more than this every minute.

Bandwidth can be increased as your website grows, so start small (unless you think your website is going to be an instant hit!) then scale up from there.

PHP: This is a popular server-side programming language used to code complex scripts on websites. ‘Server side’ means the code you add to your site will only activate when it runs from the server, so you must ensure your server has PHP installed before adding code to your pages, or it won’t work.

PHP is extremely common among paid hosting plans as a default feature; you should not expect to pay any additional cost to have this added to your hosting package.

Databases: You may want to stare data on your website, either publicly or privately (MYSQL is a popular solution). For example if you want to host a WordPress blog or phpBB Forum they will need database access to store information (blog posts, images, discussions, member profiles etc.). Almost any advanced web-based platform is going to require use of a database. 

A single database can be utilised for multiple projects, so you may only need one, but you should expect to pay an extra fee for use of one or more databases.

You may never need to access the database directly yourself, if you’re unsure what you will need you should consult your web designer with an outline of what you want to achieve, or feel free to ask us.

Paying For Your Hosting

Web hosting companies usually offer monthly or annual payment terms, a discount when paying for a year in advance is usual.

Shop around before you buy as there are a huge number of suppliers offering a wide variety of packages.

The cheapest provider may not always be the best.

Moving To A New Host

Moving your website from one host to another can be simple, depending on the complexity of your data.

For a basic collection of text and image pages you need only download your complete site and then upload it to your new hosting account — or upload direct from a local backup on your computer. A web host may be able to help you move your site, so don’t be afraid to ask (but they may charge for this!).

Final Thoughts

That wraps up our beginners guide to some of the basics of website hosting.

Thank you for sticking with us, we hope you found the information useful and wish you the best of luck getting your new website live!

Source: https://medium.com/@singularbean/what-is-web-hosting-9f30c43bf123