What exactly is web hosting?
When a visitor makes a request to your URL, a web server “hears” that request and gets the files from the disk where your website lives, and shows them to the visitor. If you want to create a simple web page, or build a massive web store like Amazon’s, you need web hosting. You build your pages using a web language like HTML, build your scripts (programs) using a server language like PERL or C#, and then you upload everything to your web host, tweak some values for your scripts (if you have scripts) and voila… your live. (That’s a very, very simplified answer.) What exactly is web hosting? – In a nutshell, web hosting is a like a folder or directory on your computer, except it’s on a computer that’s connected to the Web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And, anyone on the web can read what you put in it. To use a web host, you put your files in your space on the web host. Visitors can find your files by going to your web address (called a URL.)
Web hosting comes in different shapes and sizes. Which flavor is best for you depends on what you are trying to do; on what your “application” is. he major categories are: Shared Web Hosting, Virtual Private Hosting and Dedicated Hosting.
Within those categories you find subcategories such as e-commerce hosting and rich media hosting. At a basic level, the major category differences break down between cost and performance. Higher cost usually means higher performance, more tools and more resources. Higher performance often means increased maintenance on your part, though you can mitigate this by paying even more to have someone manage your hosting account.
On a cost basis, shared hosting is always the least expensive. – Shared hosting is generally aimed at beginners and intermediate users (though if your specific application doesn’t require CGI or database access advanced users can save tons of money with shared hosting). As the name implies, Shared hosting is “sharing” the hosting environment. Usually your web site lives in a folder along side many other folks web sites, and the same web server process serves up all of the those sites on request. This means any site in a shared that acts as a bandwidth hog will take CPU and disk access time away from other neighboring sites in the environment. Many shared hosting providers work to mitigate these circumstances by controlling the bandwidth, file sizes and overall resource usage available to any one site. Upgrades in a shared hosting generally consist of making additional bandwidth, file size and CGI access available… basically allowing you to take up a higher priority among your neighbors. All in all this is a very good balance of cost versus performance.
So, you might have a computer or disk with 10 sites on it, 10 different web servers for those sites, and 10 isolated operating environments. The advantages include better control of resource allocation and more enforceable distribution (i.e. neighbors who hog CPU and disk time in a shared environment have a more tightly controlled allocation of CPU and disk time in a virtual private server environment, so the number of cycles available to your processes are not diminished… here folks don’t have to compete for each second, the allotments are usually fixed). Another advantage is that you usually have robust CGI and database accessibility… and if you have a CGI that accidentally runs an infinite loop, it won’t suck up your neighbors CPU bandwidth allocations since the operating system environment is isolated. Consider this same scenario in a shared hosting environment where your CGI experiencing an infinite loop might lock up the system and prevent any other site in that shared environment from being served either …very bad!
Want to find out more about Hosting, then visit Nemanja Djuric’s site on how to choose the best Hosting Plan for your needs.
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