Web hosting is a service that makes websites available to the users

The first step to getting a website is hosting. For beginners who are new to the world of creating websites, web hosting refers to a service that makes your websites available to the users. Since a website is created with the intention of making it accessible to the users, you need to make sure that the website is running on a computer.

Hosting the website

For hosting the website, one needs the right equipment which includes a web server and a permanent connection to the internet. This also requires website administrative skills such as managing and configuring a web server, patch management, firewall and virus protection that is necessary to monitor the website. For launching a website and ensuring that users can view it, you need to publish it to a web hosting service. Web hosting services are provided by web servers which are high powered computers that use high speed network for the website to live on. A webserver establishes a connection that allows users to surf the web pages and download data through your website. Thus, Web Hosting is the service providing space on the Internet for websites.

Types of Hosting

As technology progressed, so have different types of web hosting, to meet the varied needs of websites.

• Shared Web Hosting
• VPS (Virtual Private Servers)
• Dedicated Hosting

Shared Web Hosting

As the name suggest, the website is hosted on a server shared by other websites. The advantage of this setup is the shared cost. This is the most common type of web hosting, since it is the easiest to start out on. The disadvantage is that, since you share server resources with a number of websites, if one site gets busy, it may affect all other sites on the server. Although this is cheaper, shared web hosting can be less flexible as you won’t be able to modify a core component or clock a specific port.

VPS

VPS stands for Virtual Private Servers, and is essentially stands between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Your website will have partitioned resources, so neighboring sites sharing the same hardware will have less effect on your site. VPS costs more than shared web hosting as compared to the later and VPS customers will have more resources at its disposal. This software provides more freedom to configure your server and also requires a higher level of technical experience.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated server hosting allows customers to have an entire server and access to all its resources for their personal use. Website owners can choose exact hardware and software specifications of the server to meet their requirements. This form of hosting website service is flexible as it gives room for customization. Your website will have full root access to their servers and can configure and tweak their setup according to your needs. Since the cost of the server is not shared with anyone, this is more expensive allowing full dedicated control on the resources and performance.

Jasmine is a freelance writer who knows the every ins and outs of hosting websites and she writes on behalf of Ivision Global