Website hosting for dummies

What is website hosting?

For most of us, the term "Website Hosting" doesn't say much, which is perfectly fine. As we don't expect history teacher to know how to solve complicated equations in mathematics, we don't expect from the common internet surfer to know any of the terms which are related to the developing and maintaining of websites over the internet.

Website hosting is the actual place the site is located. Eventually any code (As complicated and complex or simple as possible) must locate on a physical computer. The computers that contain those codes and files that make sites are called servers. The servers are located in server farms. Server farms are humongous facilities that contain thousands of servers, and contain data in a scale that you couldn't even imagine.

We understand the websites are located in servers, and those are located inside server farms. But we haven't even talked about website hosting. As we mentioned before, the websites are hosted, or in other words located, on servers inside server farms. Server hosting is the service that different companies provide to website owners or to people who are willing to build a new site. In return for a monthly payment, the costumer rents a small part of the gigantic servers of the company, and get his own  small place where he can develop and maintain his website.

Three important services website hosting should provide

If you are interested and willing to purchase website hosting, there are many  components  that each hosting service must be made of. However, in this article we will discuss in the main three important elements of services you must know, which eventually will determine which kind of service is the best for your site.

• Storage Space – Storage space is similar to the hard drive on your personal computer. The storage space tells us how much data you can store in your hosted website. If you would like to open a blog, you won't need much of a storage site for it, and you can manage to run the website with relatively small storage space (around 1 gigabyte). Nevertheless, if it is in your desire to develop a content site, for example image uploading website,  if you stick to the small storage space (as mentioned before – 1 gigabyte) you will reach to your limit pretty quickly. To that end we suggest you to think which type of website you would like to develop, and determine what kind of storage space is best for that certain type of sites.

 

• Monthly Bandwidth – Monthly bandwidth is the amount of total data is transferred from and to your site. That data can be uploaded on or downloaded from your site. Confused? Don't worry, we got examples for you. Once you browse some website, you actually download the page data (HTML code, images, etc.) and the browser translates this code into the website you all familiar with. Any type of download process from your website will be accounted inside your overall monthly bandwidth of your site. For instance, if you have the monthly bandwidth of 100 megabytes,  and your home page file size is 1 megabyte, each person who visits your homepage will consume 1% of your total monthly bandwidth. Of course in reality those numbers are significantly higher (the monthly bandwidth can reach thousands of gigabytes), but now you probably understand how that works. The monthly bandwidth includes downloading and uploading processes. If a person uploads a picture to your site, it will be accounted in the monthly bandwidth as well. Once the file has been uploaded, it will also consume some of your site's storage space.

 

• Control Panel – In order to manage your website hosting service properly and track your storage space and monthly bandwidth usage, you will have to use some kind of managing platform. The control panel organizes the complicated gibberish code lines into user-friendly interface which can be managed more easily. In this system you would be able to manage and change a lot of hosting related functions which we would not discuss in this article. Most of the sites are using the DirectAdmin control panel, and it seems it is the most dominant platform. However there are a lot of substitutes control panels, including: cPanel, Plesk, SysCP, Baifox and much more.

It is time to buy website hosting correctly

If you read the entire article and reached to this point, you probably understood the concept of the server hosting and its implications on your site, and you got the idea of how to choose the perfect website hosting service for your site. It is important to state that there are much more elements you should consider in the decision of purchasing website hosting service. Stability, defense from DDOS attacks and hacking and much more elements that many hosting company having trouble to deliver are critical to your site. Figure out what kind of hosting company you deal with. Are they reliable? Is this company going to risk your site success or contribute to it?