What is a Web Hosting Company?

What is a web hosting company?
If you want to create a website on the Internet, the first thing that you need is a Web Server. However, owning a web server is a very expensive affair; moreover, it needs a huge amount of technical expertise that most of the businesses cannot afford. It is in this situation that a web hosting company or a web host comes in. These companies supply all the relevant equipments and technical knowledge and skills that are required. The web hosts thus provide space on a server (that they own) as well as internet connectivity to their clients.

Thus utilizing the services of a web host is much cheaper than owning your personal server and definitely free from hassles.

What are the various types of hosting?

The types of hosting services are as follows:

• Free web hosting – As, the name suggests, this service is free and at times supported by advertisements. The scope of this service is very little when compared to a paid hosting.

• Shared web hosting – The space on the server provided by the web host is usually shared by lot of other websites. In a regular situation, all the domains share a common pool of server resources like the RAM and the CPU.

• Reseller web hosting – This service gives the opportunity to the clients to become web hosts themselves. It can also work for individual domains in combination with any of the other types of servicing. However, it is dependent on the provider they are associated with.

• Virtual dedicated server – This service breaks up the server into virtual servers. Hence each and every client feels that they are using their personal dedicated server, though the server is being shared by lot of other users.

• Dedicated hosting service – In this type, the client gets a web server completely to herself or himself and hence has full control over it. However, he or she actually does not really own the server.

• Collocation web hosting service – This service is somewhat similar to the dedicated hosting service; however, in this situation the client actually owns the server. The web host provides space and does the maintenance. This is certainly the most effective and expensive of all the other services. In many situations, the host does not any provide much support to the client’s machine; it only supplies the Internet facility, electrical facilities and storage facilities to the server.

• Clustered hosting – This service allows a bunch of servers to host the same content to ensure better utilization of resources.

As a consumer what are the servers that that I should use?
Not all the hosting services discussed above are very effective. Listed below are those which I think can be very useful to a consumer:

• Shared server – the shared servers gives the clients the opportunity to host their websites on a powerful and professional server at a very affordable rate. The benefits of using a shared server are – almost unlimited internet connectivity, 99% up time and round the clock monitoring with almost a fraction of the cost of dedicated server. This is extremely useful for small e-commerce websites and static web pages. No technical expertise is required to use a shared server.

• Virtual private server or VPS – this is a great combination of the flexibility of a dedicated server and affordability of a shared server. This is very useful for entry and mid level hosting needs. Some fundamental technical skills like UNIX administration, basic programming and database capabilities are required to use VPS.

• Dedicated servers – as you can make out from the name, a dedicated server is solely dedicated and devoted to a particular user. This obviously has a greater flexibility and very sophisticated and advanced database and e-commerce applications. Since there is no sharing of the disc space or a router connection, these servers give the users the most advanced web hosting solutions. These servers are generally meant for sites that experience very heavy traffic. Advanced technical skills are required to operate a dedicated server.