Web
hosting is the process of running a web site on a web host (company who is
into Internet presence providing business) to bring presence to a personal,
business or other purposes website.
What does the web hosting provide?
A web hosting company maintains many servers which they use for
thousands of customers. Depending up on customers needs and price they pay, they sometimes share a server space between customers, sometimes rent a
dedicated server to a customer and even do co-location where the customer
literally locates his web, e-mail, or database server as part of web hosting
at the web host’s facility. We will cover the different types of web hosting
later in this guide.
To achieve this, web hosting company maintains a high
degree of reliability at their facilities including high speed links to the
Internet, use highly reliable servers, and use highly fault tolerant
electrical installations including UPS, generators, redundant networking
etc...
When do you need web hosting?
You need web hosting services when you
plan to make a web site available on the Internet. You first develop it
locally on your PC, test it, make sure everything is in order. Then you
become a member of a web hosting company's services after thorough
evaluation of their features, price, support etc. Once you decide on a web
hosting company, you are ready to upload your local content to the Internet.
This is when you actually begin to use their services.
Fundamental service in web hosting.
Fundamental service they provide is HTTP
(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) by means of a web server.
Web server is from where your visitors pull web pages from. In other words,
your pages are
served to the visiting users by the web server. Your web hosting company keeps the
pages
there, for you, on their servers ready to provide it to any of your visitor
who is requesting. Their role becomes critical when you have many visitors
simultaneously or if you are running an e-commerce site which you depend up
on for your livelihood.
Next: What to look for in a host...
