Webhosting Explained

[WebHost Admin]

What is webhosting?

If you want to publish to the internet, you need to place your files on a server - a type of PC specially built to withstand constant use - which is connected to the internet.

To have those files on a server, you need to lease either a full server, or space on a server.

This is the process of webhosting, and there are many different webhosting options available.


What kind of webhosting options are available to me?

There are many options available, and this can be intimidating for people with no experience of the webhosting industry. Hopefully this site will go some way to clearing up what those actual options are.

The main types of hosting are:

• Shared Hosting
• Reseller Hosting
• VPS
• Dedicated Hosting
• Managed Hosting
• Colocation

How can I tell which type of webhosting I will need?

The type of webhosting that you will need will depend upon two main factors:

1. How much server resources you need
2. How much money you will lose if your site goes offline due to technical problems

1. Server resources needed

The amount of traffic (number of visitors) that you expect at your site at any time can help determine your actual server resource requirements.
As a general rule, as the internet traffic to your site increases, so will your site resource reqirements. Therefore you need to ensure that your website will be hosted in a way that will allow it the resources it needs to function properly.

Many hobby websites will not have much natural traffic, and therefore will only require modest hosting resources, such as Shared Hosting.

Business and e-commerce sites engaged in PPC campaigns, that may result in tens of thousands of unique visitors to your site in a month, will have higher resource requirements. They may require the improved flexibility of Reseller Hosting.

Very heavy usage may even require a Dedicated Server. In fact, some websites have so much traffic that they need a cluster of servers connected together just to keep the website functioning properly.


Of course, the number of visitors isn’t the only indicator of the resources used. Use of software and media on a website can drastically increase the amount of server resources required: extensive reliance on databases may lead to high usage of server processing power; common use of multimedia files such as audio or visual, can lead to very high bandwidth requirements.


2. Outages

There are many technical risks to a website, and at some point, those risks may result in your website being offline for some period of time. This means that no one in the world may be able to access your website.

This is known as an Outage, and may be due to scheduled maintenance, either of the server, datacenter, or carrier network, and may only be for a very short period.

However, an unscheduled outage is always a risk to any website, and can last from anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending upon the actual technical problem(s) involved.

The actual type of hosting does not determine how quickly an Outage may be rectified - that can all depend on just how good your webhosting company managing your account.

For example, a reputable company can ensure that even servers devoted to Shared Hosting runs fine the majority of the time, while a less reputable company may provide dedicated servers that are not well built, or else hosted in facilities that have very poor network connections.

However, what the different hosting options do provide is greater flexibility, so that all things being equal, the more control you have over your server, the smoother you can ensure your website operates.

Suffering any kind of Outage can be very inconvenient at the best of times. However, to determine how this may influence your decision as to which hosting to take, as a general rule, consider the impact to your revenues should your website suffers a day’s outage:

- If your losses would be just a couple dollars, then Shared Hosting should be fine,
- If your losses would be in the region of a few tens of dollars, then Reseller Hosting may suit you better,
- If your losses would be in the region of hundreds or thousands of dollars, then Dedicated Hosting would likely be a more sensible solution

[gsnarayanan]

This post is informative and very useful to biginers, like me. I am very thankful to the Administrator.

[techluck]

I am new at this forum but have found so much information here. Thank you for posting the tutorials and info.

[kelkat]

Thanks for the guide. Like the others that posted before me, I know nothing and can use all the help I can get. I'm excited about the possibilities, though.

[penguinmama]

Very comprehensive! Nice work. It shows you've put a lot of effort into researching!

[Abbey]

In a sea of irrelevant and misleading information, that's a very helpful overview for those who need to learn fast. Like me.

[parise]

There certainly is a good deal of information to be found here.

[webhosting.uk.com]

Nice informative post.

[eUKhost.com]

Nice guide for beginners