What is Webhosting? Where can I host my Website?

Harsha — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:22:52 +0000

Web hosting allows any website to be accessed from anywhere in the world through Internet. For hosting a website, you need a server. If you don't know what is a server, it is just a computer having software to send the web pages depending on the request by browsers. There are different ways we can host our website depending on the size and complexity of the website and facilities available.

Hosting in own computer: You can host your website in your own computer. This is possible, still most of the websites don't do this because of the complexity involved in maintaining the web server. You need to have a server that is always switched ON, You need 24 Internet connection with high bandwidth enough to serve the level of visitors, You need to take care of maintenance, security from virus etc, You need a static IP address for making DNS(domain name servers) to identify the address of particular domain name. Because of all these limitations, most of the websites use one of the methods explained bellow.
Shared web hosting: This is the most popular and cheapest way of web hosting. Here, a common server will be used for hosting a number of website. Web hosting companies will maintain their servers in data centers. Company will take care of all maintenance tasks. It will charge a websites on the server depending on the space they are using, bandwidth(data transferred per month) used by website, other facilities like database, software, languages supported, server speed, uptime etc. Main disadvantages of this type of hosting is, Owners of each websites will not have full access of the server, and they cannot install the software they need and they cannot change the settings/ configurations of the server. Also, If one website is utilising more system resources, other websites will suffer.
Virtual Dedicated Servers: Here, one web server will be divided in to a number of virtual servers. Using this we can overcome basic disadvantages of shared hosting. Service providers will give you guaranty for particular amount of system resources like processor cycles and Internet speed.
Dedicated servers: In This type of hosting, Webhosting companies will provide full server to the customers. Commonly you will not have need for this type of hosting unless you have a heavy website with high visitors and lot of processing is needed in for your server side scripts. In dedicated hosting, there are mainly two types called managed servers and root servers. In managed servers, hosting company will take care of all managing tasks of the server, where in root server, customer will have full access to the server and he can control everything in the server.

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What is Webhosting? Where can I host my Website?