What Is The Web Host? (Simple & Easy Tutorial)

What Is The Web Host &How Web Hosting Works?

In this post, I’ll explain to you the ins and outs of how web hosting works, in order that you can choose the best hosting company for your website.

More precisely I’ll explain to you what is a web hosting service, what features you need to focus on in any web host, and finally how to find the best and most reliable hosting company.

A web hosting service can be considered as an internet host or as another computer that has a lot of space. It is a special computer that acts as a hub to quickly hook up with other computers.

They have huge Servers that can store and manage massive amounts of data. The latter provides information backup, storage, email, and internet access that we are so dependent upon nowadays. This is why they’re employed by web hosts for customers’ websites.

Customers normally pay a hosting service to host their websites on their servers; this allows their websites to be displayed online each time someone types their URL or clicks on a link.

There are many web hosting companies that you can find online, with prices and services starting from, free, a couple of dollars a month to hundreds of dollars per month. The main types of hosting available are shared, managed, reseller, VPS, and dedicated.

When it involves choosing the perfect web host, there are some important things that you need to properly think about:

Good technical support

This is often probably one of the foremost important factors to think about. The reason is simply that if your website isn’t working for some reason; whether it is due to a server problem or something else then your web host’s technical support is going to be where you need to go for help.

So you would like them to be fast and reliable! so that you don’t lose visitors and customers.

The following is a great way to find out a bit more about your web hosting’s customer support :

Test the technical support before signing up with your chosen web host so you’ll see how fast they take to respond and what kind of experience you have. Most hosting companies have a link to their technical support on their homepage, so you need to check their response time after clicking on their support line.

If they don’t have a support link you need to avoid them together as a good host always has excellent customer service.
Hosting servers.

This is even more important for a shared hosting service since there the name states you will be sharing the servers with several other websites.

Due to shared hosting service, your website’s performance might be affected, or go down frequently.
The simplest way is to look at customer reviews and make a search online to read about possible customer complaints which can give you a good idea about the web hosting service quality.

You’ll also have to make a proper decision about what sort of hosting account you need.

Some hosting companies only offer shared hosting, while others have a variety of plans available. A host with a wide variety of plans t is usually the best choice because you can upgrade to a different plan as your sites grow and need much more resources. Thus you don’t need to move your site to a different web hosting service.

Comparing the different specifications of the hosting account.

This includes things like storage space, bandwidth limits, control panels, and other technical details so that you can run your websites in the most effective way.

The process of choosing internet hosting can be quite confusing for several people. There are countless hosting providers on the web which can make the process of finding the ‘right’ one even more difficult.
When you start your search, you need to do the right things to find the best possible web host quickly and effectively.

You can simply visit websites doing web host reviews and read and learn about several web hosting companies. These reviews can be in-depth and very helpful in determining which host will work best for your website.

Here are a few tips which can help you decide if a hosting review site is really legitimate:

It could be tempting to use free web hosting, especially if you are on a budget and are not keen thanks to buying Webhosting when you’re first getting started. While there are times when free hosting could prove to be ok, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind before choosing a free web host.

The biggest drawback to free web hosting is you don’t have total control over it. As well, you’ll always be at the mercy of the free web hosting company. If they plan to pack up, change any rules, or the way they operate, will it just have to accept it or else change hosting?

This can put you in danger of losing traffic, income, and any websites that you’ve built with hard work because they might even disappear without notice.

You are also limited on how you can configure your website on a free host. For example, you will not have a unique branded domain but you end up with a subdomain. If you start a site on WordPress.com, your URL will be normally something like mysite.wordpress.com.

This also will make it harder for your website to rank on search engines.

Another drawback is that free hosts also often include their own content and advertising on your sites. If you’ve got a personal website this will not normally affect you. But if you’re building a business website, this can have a negative impact on your email list sign-ups conversions or purchases of your own products.

When it involves choosing a good free web host it’s no different than looking for a paid host service, just make certain to do your research, read relevant reviews and compare web host-specific features.

The bottom line is, that free web hosts, can be a great option for private websites or feeders to send traffic and build backlinks to sales sites; but you are best avoiding them altogether if you are building business websites and want to generate revenue.

What Is The Web Host & Technical Side Of Web Hosting

For those among us who aren’t “tech-savvy”, choosing a web host can be definitely a lot more intimidating than buying a replacement PC. All of the technical terms that the hosting companies use, could be like learning Greek to a beginner.

Two of the most important factors when choosing a hosting plan are storage and bandwidth.

Let’s take a look at storage first; this is often the quantity of disk drive space that you will have access to once you purchase a hosting package. Disk space is used to store all the files used on your websites including such things as pages, content, scripts, images, videos, etc.

How much storage do you actually need?

This is a difficult question to answer because it depends on a lot of factors:

Video, audio, and pictures take the most space thus if you are going to use a lot of multimedia content, you’ll need a hosting plan with a big enough storage space. It’s better to have to host with unlimited storage.
The bandwidth-this is often the quantity of data that can be transferred to users by your web host in a given set of time.

Obviously, larger files like video, audio, and images use more bandwidth than text-based content. Keep in mind that as your traffic grows, or if you get a lot of traffic on your website, your bandwidth also will increase.

As it is not really easy to estimate how much traffic your website will have, it is a good idea to look for a hosting company that gives unlimited bandwidth. And if it doesn’t, then find one which has an upgrade option available.
Thus you can get a different plan as your website needs increase. You need to check out this before purchasing a web host service because if your bandwidth limits are exceeded, the prices can go up quickly and you might end up spending a lot of money.

The instrument panel offered by your web host can greatly affect the time and energy spent on your websites. Firstly, It’s designed to simplify the management and administration of your site. Secondly, It also helps you automate many of the tasks that help to make your internet site more functional.

One of the most common control panels is Cpanel. It allows you to handle all of your own administrative tasks in one place. You can do things like adding and removing email accounts, managing your database, checking website statistics, installing content management functions like WordPress, etc.

A web host that has cPanel, will make your life and working with your website much easier. Especially if you’ve got no experience with website coding, HTML, or programming. Through cPanel, you can handle your administrative tasks very easily with minimal baseline knowledge.

There are different kinds of control panels available in web hosting companies. These are the most common ones:
Plesk – Its interface is analogous to Windows XP and its features are similar to Cpanel.
DirectAdmin – Its features are quite almost like cPanel also.
hPanel
DirectAdmin

Another factor you need to consider is the number of IP addresses available through your web host. This is really important as you build multiple websites. If you’ve got multiple IP addresses, you can easily assign them to different sites in order that each website has its own unique IP online.

How To find Webhosting Reviews That You Simply Can Actually Trust.

Many people search online when they’re trying to find web hosting reviews. It is really hard to find unbiased reviews as many web reviews are made with the sole intention of making money as a lot of the websites online, are affiliate sites for specific web hosts.

Today we are getting to have a look at places where you can find unbiased reviews.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace also are great places to look for this kind of information. If you’re connected with people who are using web hosting, you can simply discuss online and ask for recommendations about particular hosts.
Much like in online forums, this may get you more objective reviews than a simple online search because most people will give you advice based on their personal experience.

You can also go find good web hosting services on blogs doing reviews. Many bloggers write posts recommending particular web hosts, but this is often the same as those online You can never be sure if they’re making recommendations with the only aim of earning a commission or if they’re sincerely trying to help.

Instead, try to have a look at some of the most popular blogs online and find out where they’re being hosted. You can find reliable hosts in this manner; since large, popular blogs are hosted on solid servers generally.

You can do so by checking on the whois tool at:http://whois.domaintools.com. This will tell you about the nameservers for any website that you type in and thus you can determine where the particular site is hosted.
Because hosting will be a vital part of any website you build, you want to make sure that you do your homework properly so as to make the right choice.

Spending the extra time upfront to find a good host is far easier than migrating your websites to another host after.

What’s The Difference Between Shared And Reseller Hosting?

With shared hosting, there’ll be various websites on one web server, all of which share the resources like storage, RAM, and bandwidth, hence the name shared hosting. This helps to keep the costs low.

Reseller hosting, on the opposite hand, as the name indicates, is the ability to provide web hosting to your clients. In this way, you act as a web hosting company yourself in turn.

Aspiring entrepreneurs normally tend to do this before starting their own hosting companies. This technique is also used by web developers and designers to add additional services to their brands.

But since most reseller accounts normally run on shared servers meaning you do not necessarily get more resources this way.

Shared hosting permits you to run multiple websites on one account with a feature called add-on domains. This allows you to build several websites through one account.

As you add more websites to the account, managing all of them gets more and more complicated.
While reseller hosting is meant to allow you to resell hosting to others, there’s no reason why you can’t just use the advantages for your own websites.

This way, each website has a separate account, and you can even assign unique IP addresses to different websites with many hosting services.

Reseller hosting doesn’t usually cost much more than shared hosting. You can find reseller accounts for as little as $7 a month, like many shared hosting accounts.

These lower-cost plans though have a limited amount of storage and bandwidth, but most hosting services will allow you to upgrade to higher-level accounts. Always choose a host who allows upgrades.

Thus you can build more sites and when your traffic increases, this won’t cause any problems.
In shared or reseller hosting, it is a good idea to find out how many sites the host will load on its servers.

Many cheaper hosting companies run too many websites on one web server. This can have negative consequences for your websites. In fact, it can seriously impact your website’s performance,

While you may never have a need for this sort of hosting, it’s a good idea to know what they’re and what they will do.

What is a dedicated server/web hosting service?

This is a kind of hosting in which you get a whole server to yourself and that will not be shared with anyone. This is in turn more costly than shared or reseller hosting.

With this sort of hosting you’ll have full control over the server including choice of OS, hardware, etc.

Server administration is typically provided by the hosting company as an add-on service. You can even use the maximum amount of bandwidth as required without sharing it with other websites

What is a Managed hosting service?

Managed hosting is when you have a dedicated server provided by your hosting company and the latter manages the server themselves. This means they take care of everything for you; they have full control over your server and perform things such as conducting software and hardware maintenance, monitoring activity, providing security as well as regularly backup your site.

What is a VPS web hosting service?

Virtual Private Server uses virtual technology and provides dedicated (private)resources on a server that is available and used by many users. Even though you don’t get dedicated server space to yourself, VPS is more stable and secure than a shared hosting service along with being much cheaper than a dedicated server hosting.

VPS is ideal for businesses with medium-level traffic that need more resources available in a shared hosting plan but has not reached the level of dedicated hosting yet.

What Is The Web Host: Conclusion

When it involves selecting the proper web hosting company, it’s definitely an enormous decision that needs to be carefully considered and researched.

So, before you decide on a web hosting company, always check its features, and reputation and thus make the best choice for you at the best price.

Related article: Best Hosting For Websites