What is hosting? Hosting, briefly speaking, is a place where you will have your web-page.
“Why do I need hosting?” you can ask. Of course, this stage of living in the web can be omitted, but I am sure you would love to have millions of people visiting your web-site.
For a client to see your page any time, your computer should be on 24/7 and, of course, it should be connected to the Internet network constantly. The traffic should be also high. Let’s agree, this is not very convenient to keep the computer working all day long. So, hosting was created once ago to solve this matter. Your web-site is just copied to a certain server.
There are several kinds of hosting nowadays. Let’s look at some of them. I would like to pay your attention to some special features which are necessary to take into account while choosing hosting.
Before choosing hosting, you should understand clearly for what you need it, what kind of site you will run and what audience it is aimed to. Here are some more points: what tools you are going to use when building the site, how big it will be, and so on.
The simplest kind of hosting is the hosting which provides customers with the services of placing a web-site which consists of 2-3 pages. It is simple, because no additional tools were used like data base or scrips usage. As a rule, the page will weigh from 2 till 5 megabytes.
A full-package hosting provides you with much more place for your web-site, where it is possible to use scripts, data base and many other features. Depending on your project size, the price of server usage can vary from 5 till 36 US dollars.
Special attention should be paid to FTP-access. Presence of this access allows to view and edit files of your web-site after having posted them to the server. Besides, there is a possibility to copy any data from your computer to the server easily. When there is no such access, it becomes difficult to edit, delete and even browse your files.
Besides, when choosing hosting, you should decide for who you create the site, in other words – who this people are and from where they are. For example, if you want to trade goods from the USA to Europe, you’d better choose a European hosting.
And one more hint. Before choosing hosting, check it for reliability. Read what other people say in forums. Some hosting providers can promise you unlimited traffic and unlimited possibilities. As a rule, these providers do not keep their word. The best way is to choose hosting with average prices and average services list.
As additional research, it is good to check technical support of a chosen hosting. Send them some e-mails and see how quickly they respond. If technical support has a low level, you just can imagine how good all the rest services will be.
Hosting services and their quality directly depend on the server cost.
Free hosting.
There is no need to explain that free hosting providers are not interested in giving you qualitative services. Very often hosting providers use people’s web-pages for advertising. Free hosting is not reliable and convenient.
Virtual hosting.
Virtual hosting is frequently used by private web-sites. But if your project us about 20-50 Megabytes, this is exactly your variant. It looks like this: one server provides an on-going work of several virtual web-sites. Virtual server can guarantee access to your site any time of the day to any user. But, generally, there are some limits for software using and some technologies are not available.
Physical hosting.
Physical hosting has no limits in software and technologies using. Besides, only your project can use technical resources. Physical hosting is generally used by owners of big web-sites.