Basic Guide To Website Hosting

If you're new to running websites, then the whole idea of website hosting can be very confusing.  In this article, we'll look at the absolute basics of website hosting, to demystify some of the technical jargon and to give you some idea of the different types of hosting that are available.

Website hosting itself refers to the way your website is made available to internet users.  Once you've created your site, all of the files that go to make up that site are stored, or hosted, on a computer, which displays those files every time somebody accesses your site through the internet.  These computers are known as servers, because they "serve up" your site to visitors.

Web Hosting technical terms

1. Domain Name - the name that identifies a specific website, for example, www.website.com.
2. Website - the content pages that you actually see when you visit a domain.
3. Web Hosting Software - the operating system, such as Windows or Linux, which creates the website and ensures that it appears online, and additional applications such as payment processing.
4. Web Hosting Hardware - the physical computer server on which the website is stored.
5. Connectivity - how the computer server connects to the wider internet.
6. Administrator - the person who sets up and looks after the computer server, ensuring that it stays running and backing up all the website data that is stored there.  An administrator will also monitor the amount of visitors that each website receives, to ensure that the server can handle that amount of traffic without crashing.

Web hosting comes in four basic types.  These are designed to suit the needs of different users, and they all have different hardware, software and connectivity requirements.

Shared hosting is where many websites are stored on the same computer server.  This is generally the cheapest form of hosting.  Dedicated hosting is the next level up, and is a one website per server arrangement.  This is a more reliable and faster form of hosting, but it's also more expensive.  The most expensive form of web hosting is co-located hosting, where a hosting company leases space in their data center for a user's own server.  Finally, there is in-house hosting, where large companies and corporations manage their own web hosting on their own servers.
If you want to run your own website, your choice of website hosting will be based on your budget and the specific requirements for your website.