Before you start searching for a web host, you should familiarize yourself with the terminology used in this field. The following terms are also considered main reasons in deciding the suitable hosting plan that meets your specifications. You can start learning what does each expression mean and how does it affect your selection.
Web Host
A web host, also known as internet server, is a computer related to the internet. This computer is more powerful than normal PCs and is arranged up to serve up websites. Your website content will are living on this computer, which will give men and women who surf the internet a way to entry your website.
Web hosts can be labeled into main categories based on the price range and common capabilities for each category:
1. Totally free Hosts: limited in space, bandwidth and other features. Appropriate for personal websites or for temporary usage. Usually enforce pop-up, textual content or banner ads. They do not provide the greatest performance and/or reliability. They supply minimum or no customer support. If you sign up for a free host, your area will be something like yourname.freehost.com or [http://www.freehost.com/yourname].
2. Shared Hosts: most web sites are using this type of hosting. Appropriate for personal, small and method businesses. Prices range from $1 to about $25 a month. Features also assortment from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. Your internet site has its own top level website (e.g. [http://www.website-hostings.net]) The number of websites on a server affects its performance and accessibility, more websites usually means less performance. Computers hosting less number of distributed websites are more expensive, yet more reliable. Some companies allow customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.
3. Dedicated Hosts: A full server dedicated to a single buyer. Usually used by large businesses and very active websites with thousands of daily visitors. The customer will certainly have full control over the server, and can create as many websites as he likes. Customer can have his own hosting company operate on a rented dedicated server. Prices depend on the specifications and services provided with the server, starting from about $100 up to about $800 dollars a 30 days.
4. Colocated Hosts: very similar to dedicated hosts, but the consumer owns the server components instead of renting it. The server may be housed in provider’s data center. Prices are a bit greater than dedicated servers.
Space / Storage
The amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s web site files, images and sources. It can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Space prices reduced significantly during the last few decades.
Databases
As you have seen in hosting server types, there are different types of directories. The most commonly used is mySQL because its an free GPL (free) software and can provide a lot of online applications’ needs such as forums, content operations, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, however, has some restrictions in its features. Complicated significant business sites will need more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Host.
Email
Most hosting plans include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain. The number and size of email accounts depends on the hosting strategy. Free plans do not usually have this attribute, small plans give about 10 accounts where big ideas do not limited the number. Those email options are usually web based and accessible through POP3 clientele as well.
Control Panel
Many web hosting companies provide their clients with a control panel, a web based program that helps in managing internet sites. Common functions in management panels are: managing email accounts, providing statistics, taking care of FTP accounts, handling domains and subdomains and managing listings. The most commonly used control panel software is cPanel. Some companies develop their own cp application.
Uptime
The important feature of web hosts is their uptime, which is usually measured in percentage. A hosting server that goes down for an average of 30 minutes an evening will have an uptime proportion of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most little to medium business web sites. Anything less than this percentage is not suitable for an enterprise website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to tell web administrators immediately when an interruption happens.
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- Web Hosts: The Essentials - May 16, 2012