Understanding Web Hosting
Understanding Web Hosting
You would like to tell all the people in the world regarding your new business establishment, and for that you would need a website. In order to do this you would need a space in the internet and a name for that space. This name is called the "domain name". A web hosting company would do all these for you against a fee. You found a catchy Doman Name and you own that name now. You would be paying an annual fee to retain that domain name, and you would also be paying an annual fee for that web space that you have hired for your webpage.
The internet is a large worldwide network, and when you are connected to the internet through your dial-up, broadband, or DSL your computer becomes a part of that network. The internet is a huge repository of information, which is accessed by millions of people every day, and this is the place where you want to have your WebPages for your organization, where you tell the visitors what you do and what you offer.
What is web hosting?
When you get connected to the internet through your computer, you are assigned with an IP address. This is known as Internet Protocol addresses, and is just like your phone number. Your family, friends, and others use your phone number to get in touch with you on phone. Like-wise, when you get connected to the internet an IP number is assigned, which is not known to you from before. This address is assigned to you from a pool of addresses that the internet has in reserve. You will only get to know your IP address only after you connect to the internet.
You can also connect to the internet by using a unique name. This is what is called Domain Name System (DNS), and computers can communicate with the internet using this name instead of the IP address. Just as your friends would look up your name to locate your telephone number, your computer gets connected to the internet by using the DNS information, such as, www.google.com, which is also known as Uniform Resource Locator, commonly known as URL. When you are trying to look at that URL, the DNS contained in the URL gets translated to that corresponding IP address, and the WebPages of that corresponding URL are displayed. As mentioned earlier, DNS is a huge internet phone book.
The website that you would want to have for your organization, and make it available to the people visiting the internet, it needs to be uploaded in a web server which permanently connects to the internet, through high-speed connection. A web server is a computer configured to run software, which provides web service with high level security features. This is the service offered by web hosting companies, who maintain these web servers and offers you the space for your website, charging you an annual fee. While hosting your WebPages with the hosting company, the company has the responsibility to maintain the software on which your website is running.
To put it very simply, you rent the space for your website on the web server belonging to your web hosting company. Your hosted website is not simply a domain name. It consists of several files, which are linked in between by HTML codes, and these codes help in displaying the text and the graphics on your computer monitor screen. These files are uploaded to your web server, which is capable of receiving requests from user computers. In response to the requests, the web server sends the files to the requesting computer, when your WebPages are displayed on its screen.
Different kinds of web hosting:
Shared hosting - The first type is "shared hosting". Most of the websites are not the large ones which would consist of hundreds of pages and thousands of files and graphics. These websites are especially targeted towards particular audiences, who are especially looking for either information, products, or some kind of services. These websites are not as huge as the ones like Yahoo or Google, which are targeted to everyone who visits the internet. Evidently the average websites, like the one you want to put up for your organization, is not going to use the full resources of the web server. The web server by itself has quite a large capacity to handle hundreds and thousands of websites like yours, and has enough resources to answer calls from other computers for the website requests. Therefor,e this web server is shared amongst the clients hosted on it. In this way the cost of the server is also shared.
Dedicated hosting - You will need all the resources of the web server if you have a huge website that brings in millions of visitors. This type of a website just takes up lot of resources, and bas such no other website can be hosted on the same server. In this case you would need a dedicated server to accommodate your hosted website. In some of the cases, the organizations wanting to put up their websites may require extra security pre-cautions, and hence would not want to share the web server with other clients. Whether the web server is shared or dedicated, the web hosting company still owns the server, and it is only the services that are rented out. In some cases, the web server is split between three or four websites, and each section of this split could be considered as a dedicated web server section.
UNIX hosting - UNIX have many versions. UNIX operating system was first developed by universities and meant for servers and networking. Presently several versions have been written by programmers all over. Most of the web servers today operate on this operating system. UNIX hosting is cheaper than the others and is quite a robust operating system. UNIX hosting costs less than the others, and is considered to be stable, secured, powerful, and fast.
Windows hosting - Hosting on Windows operating system is costlier than UNIX, simply because your web hosting company has to buy this product from Microsoft and needs a license for this operating system. Though this operating system is considered to be user-friendly, it is less secured than UNIX, and is also less powerful. However, SP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion are scripting languages which will only run on a Windows server, as also Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access database programs.
You would like to tell all the people in the world regarding your new business establishment, and for that you would need a website. In order to do this you would need a space in the internet and a name for that space. This name is called the "domain name". A web hosting company would do all these for you against a fee. You found a catchy Doman Name and you own that name now. You would be paying an annual fee to retain that domain name, and you would also be paying an annual fee for that web space that you have hired for your webpage.
The internet is a large worldwide network, and when you are connected to the internet through your dial-up, broadband, or DSL your computer becomes a part of that network. The internet is a huge repository of information, which is accessed by millions of people every day, and this is the place where you want to have your WebPages for your organization, where you tell the visitors what you do and what you offer.
What is web hosting?
When you get connected to the internet through your computer, you are assigned with an IP address. This is known as Internet Protocol addresses, and is just like your phone number. Your family, friends, and others use your phone number to get in touch with you on phone. Like-wise, when you get connected to the internet an IP number is assigned, which is not known to you from before. This address is assigned to you from a pool of addresses that the internet has in reserve. You will only get to know your IP address only after you connect to the internet.
You can also connect to the internet by using a unique name. This is what is called Domain Name System (DNS), and computers can communicate with the internet using this name instead of the IP address. Just as your friends would look up your name to locate your telephone number, your computer gets connected to the internet by using the DNS information, such as, www.google.com, which is also known as Uniform Resource Locator, commonly known as URL. When you are trying to look at that URL, the DNS contained in the URL gets translated to that corresponding IP address, and the WebPages of that corresponding URL are displayed. As mentioned earlier, DNS is a huge internet phone book.
The website that you would want to have for your organization, and make it available to the people visiting the internet, it needs to be uploaded in a web server which permanently connects to the internet, through high-speed connection. A web server is a computer configured to run software, which provides web service with high level security features. This is the service offered by web hosting companies, who maintain these web servers and offers you the space for your website, charging you an annual fee. While hosting your WebPages with the hosting company, the company has the responsibility to maintain the software on which your website is running.
To put it very simply, you rent the space for your website on the web server belonging to your web hosting company. Your hosted website is not simply a domain name. It consists of several files, which are linked in between by HTML codes, and these codes help in displaying the text and the graphics on your computer monitor screen. These files are uploaded to your web server, which is capable of receiving requests from user computers. In response to the requests, the web server sends the files to the requesting computer, when your WebPages are displayed on its screen.
Different kinds of web hosting:
Shared hosting - The first type is "shared hosting". Most of the websites are not the large ones which would consist of hundreds of pages and thousands of files and graphics. These websites are especially targeted towards particular audiences, who are especially looking for either information, products, or some kind of services. These websites are not as huge as the ones like Yahoo or Google, which are targeted to everyone who visits the internet. Evidently the average websites, like the one you want to put up for your organization, is not going to use the full resources of the web server. The web server by itself has quite a large capacity to handle hundreds and thousands of websites like yours, and has enough resources to answer calls from other computers for the website requests. Therefor,e this web server is shared amongst the clients hosted on it. In this way the cost of the server is also shared.
Dedicated hosting - You will need all the resources of the web server if you have a huge website that brings in millions of visitors. This type of a website just takes up lot of resources, and bas such no other website can be hosted on the same server. In this case you would need a dedicated server to accommodate your hosted website. In some of the cases, the organizations wanting to put up their websites may require extra security pre-cautions, and hence would not want to share the web server with other clients. Whether the web server is shared or dedicated, the web hosting company still owns the server, and it is only the services that are rented out. In some cases, the web server is split between three or four websites, and each section of this split could be considered as a dedicated web server section.
UNIX hosting - UNIX have many versions. UNIX operating system was first developed by universities and meant for servers and networking. Presently several versions have been written by programmers all over. Most of the web servers today operate on this operating system. UNIX hosting is cheaper than the others and is quite a robust operating system. UNIX hosting costs less than the others, and is considered to be stable, secured, powerful, and fast.
Windows hosting - Hosting on Windows operating system is costlier than UNIX, simply because your web hosting company has to buy this product from Microsoft and needs a license for this operating system. Though this operating system is considered to be user-friendly, it is less secured than UNIX, and is also less powerful. However, SP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion are scripting languages which will only run on a Windows server, as also Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access database programs.