What Does Web Hosting Stand for?

You have a conception that you would like to transform into a web site? Your very first move should be to sustain your enthusiasm and discover a spot for your site on the Internet so that it will be always visible to the whole world.

Where should you host your site?

Because the number of sites on the World Wide Web has increased exponentially in the last couple of years, the demand for website hosting services has also lead to the birth of countless web hosting service providers. These are companies that offer you hard disk storage space for your own web site on their web servers.

Sorts of hosting services

The range 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-based GUI. Plenty of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) deliver this service free of charge. Personal web site proprietors and companies can also obtain website hosting services from different hosting distributors. Personal web hosting services are usually either free, ad-subsidized, or affordably priced. Business website hosting services often cost more, but thanks to the huge competition on the hosting market, an escalating number of hosting vendors, like us at Plenty-Hosting, offer business web hosting services at cut-rate prices and with flexible billing periods.

Kinds of web sites and their requirements

The charge-free web hosting solution is generally sufficient for personal sites like portfolios or online journals. A larger website, such as a community portal or a corporate web site, necessitates a more advanced hosting solution that offers database support and application development platforms (including PHP). If you wish to host an online shop, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the hosting provider of your choosing. Now, Secure Sockets Layer certificates are offered by most hosting service providers.

The web hosting Control Panel

The hosting vendor normally also provides a hosting Control Panel graphical user interface for managing your files, email mailbox accounts, mailbox aliases, domains, DNS records, and so on.

Service reliability

When choosing a hosting accounts provider, service uptime is a very vital factor. The availability of a web site is estimated on an annual basis by taking into account the time when the website is publicly accessible and viewable on the Internet. Network and service availability guarantees, therefore, should be carefully taken into account when ordering a hosting package. The best thing to do is double-check the service-level agreements and the Terms & Conditions of the hosting accounts provider of your choice in advance. Reading reviews from current clients is also a quite smart move before you choose to register.

The shared web hosting platform

The most popular and affordable type of web hosting service is the shared web hosting solution. It includes 24x7x365 support, which is an enormous upside for users who do not want to deal with server maintenance procedures, but could also impede clients who wish to exercise more authority over the hosting server. For such users, a virtual private servers or a dedicated hosting would be more suitable. Most standard applications and scripts work alright on a shared server. Moreover, the shared web hosting solution is more affordably priced than other types of web hosting solutions, like the dedicated hosting, since the web host divides the server among numerous customers. The shared web hosting solution usually includes system resource usage restrictions that guarantee that the separate clients do not interfere with each other and that the shared server stays stable.

Handling your shared website hosting account

Shared website hosting plans normally include a web-based hosting Control Panel, like cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, etc. Most of the large-sized web hosting providers, again like us at Plenty-Hosting, avail of their own custom-designed web hosting Control Panel.

Server maintenance

With the shared website hosting solution, the web hosting solutions provider is responsible for managing the web and email servers, for installing web server software, security updates and patches, and for providing tech support to its clients. Most web servers are based on the Linux OS. The host's administrators are responsible for maintaining the Operating System up to date, unless you have a dedicated hosting server and full root privileges.