I often come across clients, that I’m working with to help them develop an online presense, who ask me, “What is hosting?”Â.
Simply put hosting is what makes your website available on the world wide web.
Some people will say, “well my PC is online why can’t I host my website from here? Well if your ISP will allow you, you can! but in most cases it is NOT a good idea to do so. If a business is going to spend the time and resources to develop and market a website, they want it to be available 24/7. Host providers use dedicated web servers which are computers networked through multiple connections (in case one goes down) and generally have redundant (more than one) power supplies (generators), back up hard drives, security and technicians on staff who pretty much know what they are doing. To properly host a website from your office or business location with just the bare basics would run you around $1000 to 1500 USD per month.
A host provider, is a company (like orionsweb hosting) that has contracted with data centres, server engineers, system administrators, and technicians to provide or resell space on a server.
Your web hosting service provider will provide you with a specified amount of hard disk space, bandwidth (sometimes called transfer). With a shared hosting environment you’ll be provided access to a hosting control panel like Plesk or CPanel (two popular versions, though there are many many others available today). Through your control panel you are able to set up and control the settings for your email, your ftp user names and passwords, and many other services that can accompany a web hosting account.
If you have a larger website or multiple websites your web hosting company may provide you with a dedicated server or the extremely popular VPS (virtual private server). Most dedicated hosting options will leave you with a root user name and password for your server. From there it is up to you what server software (eg. Apache) you want to install, and what control panel if any you wish to use. If you are not technically inclined or don’t have a clue what SSH, root, apache, courier-imap, sendmail, qmail etc mean, then make sure you find a ‘managed’ service.
Managed services will generally look after installing and setting up your operating service (usually Linux though Windows can be used), your web server (Apache or IIS), and any other software (eg. control panels etc) so that you can operate your website how you want. The greatest benefit of a managed service is that they will update your OS, with available security patches, updates etc. as required, and will assist you when you have problems.
Well that’s some of the basics of hosting.
