What Exactly is Hosting?

You have an idea that you wish to transform into a web site? Your first move should be to uphold your inspiration and find a spot for your website on the Internet so that it will be always visible to the whole world.

Where should you host your web page?

Since the number of web pages online has risen rapidly during the last couple of years, the need for hosting services has also lead to the emergence of innumerable hosting vendors. These are companies that offer you hard drive storage space for your own web page on their servers.

Kinds of web hosting services

The ambit of web hosting services fluctuates immensely, so do the needs of the website proprietors. The most basic type of hosting is the small-size file hosting solution, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web interface. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge. Personal web site owners and firms can also obtain web hosting services from various web hosting suppliers. Personal website hosting services are usually either free, advertisement-financed, or moderately priced. Business website hosting services typically are more expensive, but owing to the great competition on the hosting marketplace, an escalating number of hosting providers, like us at Adirondack Online Services, LLC, provide business hosting services at discounted prices and with flexible invoicing periods.

Types of websites and their requirements

The free-of-cost hosting platform is usually sufficient for personal web pages such as portfolios or online journals. A more frequently visited web site, like a social network or a corporate web page, needs a more powerful web hosting solution that provides database support and application development platforms (including PHP). If you desire to build an e-shop, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the web hosting distributor of your choosing. Today, SSL certificates are offered by most web hosting service providers.

The hosting Control Panel

The web hosting plans provider typically also provides a Control Panel interface for administering your web site files, electronic mail addresses, electronic mail aliases, domain names, DNS records, and so on.

Service stability

When picking a hosting package, website availability is a very essential criterion. The accessibility of a web site is assessed on an annual basis by taking into consideration the time when the website is publicly available and viewable on the Internet. Network and service uptime guarantees, therefore, should be cautiously examined when signing up for a hosting package. You should re-examine the SLAs and the Terms & Conditions of the hosting plans provider of your choosing in advance. Finding online reviews from current clients is also a quite clever step before you reach a decision to register.

The shared web hosting platform

The most popular and inexpensive type of web hosting service is the shared web hosting solution. It includes 24-7 support, which is an enormous advantage for clients who would not like to deal with server maintenance tasks, but could also impede clients who wish to have more control over the web hosting server. For such users, a VPSs or a dedicated servers would be more appropriate. Most popular apps and scripts work fine on a shared server. In addition, the shared web hosting solution is cheaper than other kinds of hosting solutions, like the dedicated hosting, because the web hosting provider splits the shared web hosting server among multiple clients. The shared hosting platform usually involves usage limitations that guarantee that the different clients do not interfere with each other and that the shared web hosting server remains stable.

Managing your shared hosting account

Shared website hosting packages usually include a web-based hosting Control Panel graphical user interface, like cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, etc. The majority of the large-size web hosts, again like us at Adirondack Online Services, LLC, utilize their own personal custom-made hosting Control Panel user interface.

Server maintenance

With the shared hosting solution, the hosting packages provider is responsible for administering the web and email servers, for installing server software, security updates and patches, and for providing tech support to its clients. The majority of servers are based on the Linux OS. The web hosting provider's admins are responsible for keeping the OS up to date, unless you have a dedicated server and complete root access.