What Precisely is Hosting?

You have a notion that you want to transform into a website? Your very first move should be to retain your enthusiasm and find a spot for your web site on the web so that it will be always available for the whole world to see.

Where should you host your website?

Because the number of web sites online has increased exponentially over the last couple of years, the demand for web hosting services has also lead to the emergence of countless hosting distributors. These are companies that offer you hard drive storage space for your own website on their web hosting servers.

Types of web hosting services

The scope of hosting services fluctuates enormously, so do the requirements of the web page 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 Control Panel. Lots of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) deliver this service for free. Personal website possessors and companies can also get website hosting services from various hosting service providers. Personal web hosting services are usually either free, advertisement-financed, or affordably priced. Business web hosting services often cost more, but owing to the gigantic competition on the hosting market, an escalating number of hosting suppliers, like us at Melanesia Web Hosting, provide business website hosting services at affordable prices and with flexible billing cycles.

Kinds of web sites and their prerequisites

The charge-free website hosting solution is usually sufficient for personal sites like portfolios or online diaries. A more resource-demanding web site, such as a community portal or a corporate web page, necessitates a more advanced hosting platform that provides database support and web application development platforms (e.g. PHP). If you wish to host an e-commerce website, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the web hosting packages provider of your choice. Today, Secure Sockets Layer certificates are supplied by most web hosts.

The web hosting Control Panel

The hosting plans provider normally also provides a hosting Control Panel GUI for handling your web content, e-mail accounts, mail aliases, domains, DNS records, and so on.

Service reliability

When picking a hosting solution, network uptime is a very important criterion. The availability of a website is measured on a yearly basis by taking into account the time when the web site is publicly accessible and discoverable online. Network and service availability guarantees, therefore, should be mindfully taken into consideration when signing up for a hosting service. The best thing to do is re-examine the SLAs and the ToS of the hosting packages provider of your choosing in advance. Finding online reviews from current customers is also a quite smart move before you reach a decision to subscribe.

The shared hosting platform

The most popular and affordably priced type of web hosting service is the shared hosting solution. It offers 24/7 client support, which is a big plus for users who do not wish to deal with server maintenance tasks, but could also obstruct clients who wish to exercise more authority over the hosting server. For such users, a VPSs or a dedicated servers would be more appropriate. Most standard applications and scripts work alright on a shared web hosting server. What's more, the shared web hosting solution is more affordably priced than other types of hosting solutions, like the dedicated hosting, since the web hosting plans provider splits the server among many customers. The shared web hosting solution normally includes usage restrictions that guarantee that the different clients do not interfere with each other and that the web server stays stable.

Managing your shared website hosting account

Shared website hosting packages usually include a web-based hosting Control Panel interface, like cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, etc. Most of the big hosting service providers, again like us at Melanesia Web Hosting, use their own personal custom-built Control Panel user interface.

Server maintenance

With the shared hosting platform, the hosting services provider is responsible for managing the web and mail servers, for installing web server software, software updates and patches, and for providing technical support to its customers. Most servers are based on the Linux OS. The web hosting service provider's administrators are responsible for keeping the Operating System up to date, unless you have a dedicated hosting server and complete root-level access.