Hosting Clarified

You have a notion that you wish to convert into a web site? Your first step should be to keep your inspiration and discover a place for your web page on the Internet so that it will be always available for the whole world to see.

Where should you host your site?

Since the number of web pages on the World Wide Web has risen rapidly during the last few years, the need for web hosting services has also lead to the emergence of countless hosting companies. These are firms that offer you storage space for your own site on their web servers.

Varieties of web hosting services

The ambit of hosting services fluctuates hugely, so do the necessities of the web site possessors. The most basic type of hosting is the small-scale file hosting solution, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web-based hosting Control Panel. A lot of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) deliver this service free of cost. Personal website possessors and corporations can also obtain hosting services from various hosting distributors. Personal website hosting services are usually either free, ad-supported, or reasonably priced. Business website hosting services typically are more expensive, but because of the big rivalry on the web hosting marketplace, an increasing number of web hosting firms, like us at OKCISP (OKC's Internet Space Provider), offer business website hosting services at slashed prices and with flexible billing intervals.

Types of sites and their prerequisites

The charge-free website hosting solution is generally sufficient for personal web sites like portfolios or online blogs. A more popular web site, like a social networking site or a corporate page, needs a more advanced hosting platform that offers database support and application development platforms (including PHP). If you would like to establish an e-shop, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the hosting distributor of your choosing. These days, SSL certificates are provided by most web hosting providers.

The web hosting Control Panel

The web hosting packages provider typically also provides a web hosting Control Panel user interface for administering your web content, electronic mail accounts, mail aliases, domains, DNS records, and so on.

Service reliability

When picking a hosting packages provider, website accessibility is a very important criterion. The accessibility of a web site is calculated on an annual basis by taking into account the time when the website is publicly accessible and discoverable on the World Wide Web. Network and service availability guarantees, therefore, should be mindfully considered when ordering a hosting plan. You should re-examine the service-level agreements and the Terms of Use of the web hosting supplier of your choice in advance. Reading online reviews from existing clients is also a rather sensible move before you reach a decision to sign up.

The shared hosting platform

The most popular and inexpensive type of web hosting service is the shared web hosting solution. It includes round-the-clock customer support, which is an enormous advantage for clients who do not want to deal with server maintenance procedures, but could also hamper clients who want to exert more authority over the hosting server. For such customers, a VPSs or a dedicated packages would be more appropriate. Most standard apps and scripts work alright on a shared web hosting server. In addition, the shared hosting solution is less expensive than other types of hosting solutions, like the dedicated hosting, because the web hosting solutions provider divides the shared server among lots of users. The shared hosting platform normally involves resource usage restrictions that ensure that the different customers do not meddle with each other and that the web hosting server remains stable.

Administering your shared web hosting account

Shared web hosting plans usually offer a web-based hosting Control Panel GUI, like cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, and so on. Most of the large-sized web hosting providers, again like us at OKCISP (OKC's Internet Space Provider), use their very own personal custom-designed web hosting Control Panel.

Web server maintenance

With the shared hosting solution, the hosting supplier is responsible for administering the web and mail servers, for installing server software, security updates and patches, and for providing tech support to its customers. The majority of web servers are based on the Linux Operating System. The web host's administrators are in charge of keeping the OS up to date, unless you have a dedicated web hosting server and full server root access.