What is Web Hosting?
April 25, 2008 – 1:41 pmEvery website needs a home. For a web site to be available on the Internet, it has to be hosted on a web server. This is where web hosting comes in. Web hosting is a service that provides individuals, companies and users with online systems for storing pages, images, videos, or any content accessible via the Web.
There are plenty of companies, like ourselves, known as web hosts or web hosting providers that provide these services. Web Hosting providers setup and manage web servers that are located in large purpose built Datacenters, mostly situated in major towns and cities around the world link to the ‘hubs’ of the internet. Users upload their web pages to these servers so their websites can viewed by people from anywhere in the world.
To access a website people need to know the ‘domain name’ of the site e.g. microsoft.com, apple.com, netmotivated.co.uk etc. When you type a website address into your web browser something clever then happens. Every domain name has something called a ‘Domain Nameserver’ record, commonly known as ‘DNS’ which allows internet service providers (Virgin, BT, Tiscali etc) to know exactly where that website can be found thus allowing people surfing the internet to view the website they were looking for (requesting). Think of your postal address, to find it people have to follow a route to get it to it and sometimes there is more than one route depending on where you are coming from, a web site is no different, except all this happens almost instantly without you have to leave you seat….amazing!
There are varying levels of web hosting ranging from basic shared web hosting starting from anything around 99p per month (there are free providers, but we wouldn’t recommend using them) to comprehensive dedicated server hosting costing £££s per month. The type of web hosting a person or company requires depends on there amount of space a web site will require (ie: what size the files are), the amount of traffic a web site will get and the hosting features that a site will require. When choosing a web hosting provider for your website, discover how good their support is first if you can, over time you will find this is often more important than the price you pay.
Netmotivated Ltd
http://www.netmotivated.co.uk
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