What is Web Hosting?

You have a conception that you would like to convert into a web page? Your very first move should be to keep your enthusiasm and find a spot for your web page on the World Wide Web so that it will be constantly available for the whole world to see.

Where should you host your web page?

Because the number of web pages on the World Wide Web has grown rapidly over the last couple of years, the demand for website hosting services has also lead to the emergence of innumerable web hosting suppliers. These are firms that offer you space for your own site on their hosting servers.

Types of hosting services

The ambit of hosting services fluctuates immensely, so do the demands of the web site proprietors. The most basic web hosting type is the small-size file hosting solution, where files can be uploaded using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web-based Control Panel. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge. Personal web site possessors and firms can also obtain website hosting services from various hosting distributors. Personal web hosting services are typically either free, ad-subsidized, or affordably priced. Business website hosting services often are more expensive, but thanks to the immense competition on the web hosting market, a growing number of web hosting service providers, like us at Wantok Web Hosting, furnish business website hosting services at cut-rate prices and with flexible invoicing periods.

Sorts of websites and their requirements

The free-of-charge hosting solution is usually sufficient for personal web pages such as portfolios or online journals. A busier web site, like a community web portal or a corporate portal, requires a more advanced hosting package that provides database support and application development platforms (including PHP). If you wish to create a web store, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the web hosting vendor of your choice. These days, Secure Sockets Layer certificates are offered by the majority of hosting corporations.

The hosting Control Panel

The hosting supplier typically also offers a Control Panel GUI for managing your website files, email addresses, mail aliases, domain names, DNS records, and so on.

Service uptime

When choosing a hosting services provider, service uptime is a very essential criterion. The availability of a web site is calculated on an annual basis by taking into account the time when the web site is publicly accessible and reachable on the World Wide Web. Network and service availability guarantees, therefore, should be mindfully considered when ordering a web hosting package. The best thing to do is double-check the SLAs and the ToS of the web hosting supplier of your choice in advance. Reading online reviews from current clients is also a pretty clever move before you make up your mind to register.

The shared hosting solution

The most famous and affordable type of web hosting service is the shared hosting solution. It offers 24x7 customer support, which is a huge upside for clients who do not want to deal with server maintenance procedures, but could also impede customers who want to exercise more authority over the web hosting server. For such clients, a virtual private servers or a dedicated hosting would be more appropriate. Most popular applications and scripts work okay on a shared hosting server. Besides, the shared hosting solution is cheaper than other kinds of hosting solutions, like the dedicated hosting, because the web hosting supplier divides the server among multiple users. The shared hosting platform typically includes resource usage limitations that guarantee that the separate users do not meddle with each other and that the server stays stable.

Administering your shared website hosting account

Shared website hosting packages normally offer a web-based Control Panel user interface, such as cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, and so on. The majority of the big web hosting suppliers, again like us at Wantok Web Hosting, make use of their own custom-made hosting Control Panel.

Web server maintenance

With the shared hosting platform, the hosting supplier is responsible for administering the web and email servers, for installing web server software, security updates and patches, and for providing technical support to its customers. Most servers are based on the Linux OS. The web hosting vendor's sysadmins are in charge of maintaining the Operating System up to date, unless you have a dedicated hosting server and complete root-level access.