What is Hosting?

You have a conception that you would like to turn into a web site? Your very first step should be to preserve your inspiration and discover a place for your web site on the web so that it will be always visible to the whole world.

Where should you host your web page?

Because the number of web pages on the web has risen exponentially during the last several years, the demand for web hosting services has also lead to the birth of innumerable hosting distributors. These are firms that offer you hard disk storage space for your own web site on their hosting servers.

Kinds of web hosting services

The range of web hosting services fluctuates vastly, so do the necessities of the web site owners. The most basic web hosting type is the small-scale file hosting solution, where files can be uploaded using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web-based Control Panel. Plenty of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer this service for free. Personal website proprietors and firms can also get hosting services from different hosting vendors. Personal web hosting services are typically either free, advertisement-subsidized, or modestly priced. Business website hosting services normally are more expensive, but due to the gigantic competition on the web hosting market, an increasing number of hosting firms, like us at AIDA Host, supply business website hosting services at low prices and with flexible invoicing intervals.

Types of web sites and their requirements

The free-of-charge web hosting solution is generally sufficient for personal web sites like portfolios or blogs. A busier web site, like a social networking website or a corporate site, calls for a more powerful web hosting platform that provides database support and web application development platforms (e.g. PHP). If you want to host an online shop, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the hosting services provider of your choosing. Today, SSL certificates are supplied by the majority of hosting vendors.

The web hosting Control Panel

The web hosting solutions provider usually also provides a hosting Control Panel tool for managing your web site files, email box accounts, mail aliases, domain names, DNS records, etc.

Service dependability

When picking a hosting supplier, website availability is a very important criterion. The accessibility of a website is calculated on a yearly basis by taking into consideration the time when the website is publicly available and visible on the web. Network and service uptime guarantees, therefore, should be vigilantly taken into account when ordering a web hosting plan. You should re-examine the service-level agreements and the Terms & Conditions of the hosting packages provider of your choice in advance. Finding online reviews from current customers is also a rather good step before you choose to sign up.

The shared web hosting solution

The most widely used and inexpensive type of web hosting service is the shared hosting solution. It offers 24/7/365 support, which is a huge benefit for clients who do not want to deal with server maintenance procedures, but could also impede clients who want to have more control over the server. For such customers, a VPSs or a dedicated servers would be more appropriate. Most standard applications and scripts work okay on a shared web server. Besides, the shared web hosting solution is less expensive than other kinds of web hosting solutions, like the dedicated hosting, since the web hosting vendor divides the shared server among a lot of users. The shared web hosting solution normally involves resource usage limits that guarantee that the different customers do not meddle with each other and that the shared hosting web server remains stable.

Administering your shared web hosting account

Shared website hosting packages usually include a web-based web hosting Control Panel, such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, and so on. The majority of the big web hosts, again like us at AIDA Host, utilize their own custom-made hosting Control Panel user interface.

Server maintenance

With the shared web hosting solution, the web hosting provider is responsible for administering the web and electronic mail servers, for installing web server software, software updates and patches, and for offering technical support to its customers. Most servers are based on the Linux OS. The hosting service provider's sysadmins are in charge of maintaining the Operating System up to date, unless you have a dedicated web hosting server and root-level access.