The one who wants to enter in this web world and desires for a long time sur­vival, then he/​she should be famil­iar with each and every ter­mi­nol­ogy used in this field. If user con­sid­ers all the impor­tant fac­tors before choos­ing a host­ing plan then only he/​she will be able to have a suc­cess­ful future in this world .User should not choose any of the plan, rather he/​she should opt the best and most suit­able one and this can only be made pos­si­ble by fetch­ing more and more infor­ma­tions and also by study­ing prop­erly all the require­ments. New com­ers should start from the basics .They should learn the mean­ing of each and every term used and also in addi­tion those fac­tors that can affect his/​her selection.

Web Host

Web host refers to a com­puter con­nected to the inter­net. Web host can also be termed as ‘web server’. The com­puter that is play­ing the role of the web server needs to be more pow­er­ful than nor­mal PCs and the func­tion of this web server is to serve up web­sites.

The web­site con­tent of the user will remain will on this com­puter, so as the peo­ple who are surf­ing on the inter­net can get a way to access his/​her website.

There can be three main cat­e­gories in which the web host can be clas­si­fied based on the eco­nomic fac­tor and com­mon features:

1. Free Hosts:

The users who are not pro­fes­sional but are mak­ing web­site only as a hobby then for them free host­ing can be a good option. In free host­ing space, band­width and other fea­tures pro­vided are very lim­ited. With free web host­ing one can not only make his/​her web­site suc­cess­ful but is also suit­able for per­sonal web­sites or for tem­po­rary usage. Gen­er­ally free host­ing enforces pop-​​up, text or ban­ner ads. Reli­a­bil­ity, best per­for­mance and cus­tomer sup­port lacks in case of free host­ing as well. When a user reg­is­ters for a free host then the word free host gets added with the user’s domain name that gives an adverse effect in the eye of the visitors.

2. Shared Hosts:

The next type of the web host­ing to be dis­cussed is shared host­ing. This host­ing ser­vice is used by many of the web sites .This type of host­ing ser­vice is Suit­able for per­sonal, small and medium busi­nesses. This ser­vice can be used by pay­ing $1 to $25 per month. The fea­tures pro­vided by this ser­vice vary from very lim­ited space/​bandwidth to semi-​​dedicated servers. The users host their web­site by this type of host­ing ser­vice and it has its own top level domain facil­ity. No doubt that shared web host­ing is quite bet­ter than free host­ing but still it does not pro­vide 100% sat­is­fac­tory ser­vices. In case of shared host­ing one server is shared by the num­ber of web­sites so its per­for­mance and avail­abil­ity gets affected. More web­sites usu­ally means less per­for­mance. If less num­ber of web­sites are hosted by one server then it will be more expen­sive, but in this case there are more chances of reli­a­bil­ity. There are many com­pa­nies allow­ing cus­tomers to host mul­ti­ple web­sites with dif­fer­ent domains under a sin­gle account.

3. Ded­i­cated Hosts:

The next type of host­ing is ded­i­cated host­ing. This type of host­ing is most reli­able host­ing. In this type of host­ing a full server is ded­i­cated to a sin­gle cus­tomer. Gen­er­ally this type of host­ing is used by large busi­nesses, pro­fes­sion­als and very active web­sites deal­ing with thou­sands of vis­i­tors daily. The cus­tomers hav­ing ded­i­cated host­ing can have their total con­trol over the server as well as able to cre­ate as many web­sites as they like. Cus­tomers can run their own host­ing com­pany on a rented ded­i­cated server. Pay­ment mod­ule is men­tioned accord­ing to spec­i­fi­ca­tions and ser­vices pro­vided with the server, which varies from $100 up to about $800 dol­lars per month.

4. Col­lo­cated Hosts:

Now the other type of host­ing ser­vice to be dis­cussed is col­lo­cated host­ing. This ser­vice is very much sim­i­lar to ded­i­cated host­ing. The dif­fer­ence between col­lo­cated host­ing and ded­i­cated host­ing is that in col­lo­cated host­ing the cus­tomer owns the server hard­ware instead of rent­ing it. In this ser­vice the server will be placed in provider’s data cen­ter. This ser­vice is more expen­sive than ded­i­cated hosting.

5. Reseller Hosts:

In reseller host­ing the providers offers web server stor­age to their cus­tomers, and resells the web server stor­age to them. Gen­er­ally providers offer resellers a dis­count price.

6. Other Hosts:

Includ­ing the above type of hosts there are also many other hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these hosts will not be dis­cussed in this article.

Domain Name

Domain name is the name which shows the place where one’s web­site is located. The actual address of the web­site is a set of num­bers. Each and every web server has its own unique address. Domain name indi­cates the real addresses of every web­sites. One can eas­ily remem­ber the domain name of any of the web­site. Remem­ber­ing domain name is eas­ier than recall­ing the IP addresses.

Space /​ Stor­age

Space is one of the ser­vices pro­vided by the web host. It plays a very impor­tant role in the web­site devel­op­ment. It hap­pens many times that the cus­tomer requires more space but the host fails to pro­vide it, so cus­tomer should be very care­ful while choos­ing the web host. Stor­age is the amount of web server’s disk space avail­able for customer’s web­site files, images and data­bases. Space can be accord­ing to the require­ment; it can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some ded­i­cated servers. Ear­lier prices of the space were very high but prices reduced sig­nif­i­cantly dur­ing the last few years. The host­ing plans offer­ing 3GB of space for less than $10 a month can be eas­ily available.

Band­width

Band­width can be defined as the amount of data trans­ferred from web server to clients’ inter­net browsers. When ever a per­son out­look a page the data is trans­mit­ted from the server to that per­son’ PC. If any one is hav­ing audio, video and images in his/​her web­site then the band­width con­sumed is more in com­par­i­son of the web­site hav­ing only text con­tents. The band­width avail­able in free host­ing can be as low as 100MB per month where as in some ded­i­cated servers the band­width avail­able is as high as 2000GB a month. The cus­tomers who don’t want to pay more for band­width can eas­ily find host­ing plans offer­ing 75GB of monthly data trans­fer for less than $10.

Server Type

Gen­er­ally server means the oper­at­ing sys­tem than runs the web server. Some com­mon types are Win­dows, Linux and UNIX. Server type refers the server side script­ing and data­base types. The dif­fer­ence between Win­dows server and Linux/​UNIX is that Win­dows runs ASP and ASP​.NET with Access or SQL Server data­bases where as Linux/​UNIX servers usu­ally runs CGI, PHP or JSP with MySQL or Ora­cle data­bases. The other dif­fer­ence is that Win­dows servers are more expen­sive than Linux/​UNIX servers.

Data­bases

As server type is dis­cussed ear­lier also, we are able to know that there are dif­fer­ent types of data­bases avail­able. The mostly used is MySQL as it is open source GPL (free) soft­ware and can serve a lot of online appli­ca­tions’ require­ments such as forums, con­tent man­age­ment, mail­ing lists, etc. MySQL, rather its fea­tures are lim­ited. MySQL is suf­fi­cient for small con­cern but it is not pow­er­ful for the com­pli­cated large busi­ness sites. Large busi­ness requires more pow­er­ful data­bases such as Ora­cle or SQL Server.

.

Server Side Scripting

Usu­ally the new com­ers pre­fer to use PHP as server side script­ing. The rea­son behind this is that there are hun­dreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that are able to ful­fill the webmaster’s require­ments. How­ever PHP also has some lim­i­ta­tions in fea­tures required by advanced web­sites same as in the case of MySQL, due to this lim­i­ta­tion some pro­fes­sional web devel­op­ers pre­fer to use ASP​.NET or JSP. Some other devel­op­ers still pre­fer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Email

Now the next very impor­tant aspect to be talked about is Email. At present no one can move fur­ther in this com­puter world with hav­ing his/​her Email account. The one who is plan­ning to do any kind of activ­ity through com­puter such as to run a busi­ness or to pro­vide any kind of ser­vice, then the first thing he/​she need to do is to open an Email account. There are many host­ing plans that include the fea­ture of hav­ing some email accounts with customer’s domain. The avail­abil­ity of num­ber and size of email accounts totally depends on the host­ing plan one opted. Gen­er­ally this fea­ture is not included in free host­ing. Small plans pro­vide only about 10 accounts where as big plans do not have the lim­ited num­ber. Usu­ally those email accounts are web based and acces­si­ble through POP3 clients as well.

File Trans­fer Pro­to­col (FTP)

The other ser­vice is FTP. File Trans­fer Pro­to­col is a usual way of trans­fer­ring files across the Inter­net. Most of the web­mas­ters used to upload and down­load their web­sites con­tents through FTP. The process of upload­ing or down­load­ing is per­formed by using FTP client soft­ware. Web­mas­ters require FTP user­name and pass­word so as to access their web server. There are any hosts who use to pro­vide more than one FTP account to their cus­tomers as per their require­ment. Rather FTP is unspec­i­fied; it is not advis­able as per the secu­rity reasons.

Con­trol Panel

Con­trol panel is the ser­vice avail­able by many of the web host­ing com­pa­nies to their cus­tomers. It is a web based appli­ca­tion that helps in man­ag­ing web­sites. Some impor­tant func­tions per­formed by the con­trol panel are that it used to man­age email accounts, pro­vid­ing sta­tis­tics, man­ag­ing FTP accounts, man­ag­ing domains and sub-​​domains and man­ag­ing data­bases. The con­trol panel appli­ca­tion that is mostly used by the user is cPanel. There are many com­pa­nies who use to develop their own con­trol panel application.

Uptime

Now after hav­ing all the ser­vices, the thing of con­cern which remains is how the user keeps his/​her web­site uptime most of the time. If any­one is hav­ing a web­site with excel­lent fea­tures but it remains down most of the time it will be of no use, as when ever the vis­i­tors visit his/​her web­site and found it down then later on they will think twice before vis­it­ing it. In result he/​she will suf­fer the loss of vis­i­tors. Uptime is very impor­tant fea­ture of web hosts and that is usu­ally mea­sured in per­cent­age. If a server remains down near about 30 min­utes a day will have an uptime per­cent­age of about 99.98%, which is accept­able for most small to medium busi­ness web­sites. If any of the busi­ness web­site is not hav­ing at least this per­cent­age of uptime then that web­site is not suit­able for a busi­ness web­site. Mis­sion crit­i­cal sites can­not tol­er­ate fre­quent out­ages, thus they may use web mon­i­tor­ing ser­vices to notify web admin­is­tra­tors imme­di­ately when an out­age happens.

Price

Finally the fac­tor left is price. In this option also there is a great vari­abil­ity found like for exam­ple cus­tomer is hav­ing option to choose between the prices rang­ing from 0 to $1000 per month. For most per­sonal, small and medium web­sites the total amount of cost involved is just $15 per month. Thus its not at all advis­able for busi­ness web­site own­ers to select very cheap plans let say less than $5 because this price can lead to huge cost indi­rectly afterwards.

Related posts:

1. Con­cept of Shared Web Hosting
2. Com­plete Guide To Ded­i­cated Hosting
3. What’s the dif­fer­ence between man­ag­ing your own ded­i­cated server and get­ting host­ing ser­vice for one?
4. VPS Host­ing: Shared Host­ing on Steroids
5. Vps Host­ing– Advanced Shared Host­ing With Total Control!