| |
best website hosting
Article
Below,
you'll find extensive information on leading best website hosting articles
and products to help you on your way to success.
A Beginner Guide to Web Hosting
By Andrew Loh
What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.
Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web providers.
A well-established web provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, the ‘Best Web Host of the Year 2003’ award winner, iPowerWeb, is a web company that hosts more than 200,000 websites. For that reason, a web company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ‘store’ the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
What are the different types of web hosting? There are different kinds of web companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:
a. Shared Hosting
In shared (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.
However, a reputable and experience web provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web provider can therefore afford to offer a lower price. For the same reason, websites on the shared would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared plans start at $5 - $20 per month.
b. Dedicated Hosting
In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated assigned a specific web server to be used
only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a result, dedicated is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.
c. Co-location hosting
In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web providers and customers only rent the web server during the period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web provider’s secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location range from $500 - $1000 per month.
d. Reseller hosting
In reseller hosting, a web provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web as a add-on service to complement their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a account from the web provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web company on the Internet and start selling web plans under its brand).
To the reseller’s customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller is generally not a good option.
However, the web market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web provider from a reseller? You don’t judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the reseller’s customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don’t be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.
In general, resellers can be distinguished from their price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web providers offering superb quality web at the price ranging between $7 - $10.
Therefore, you should not strive to find the lowest price web companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don’t expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web plans to host your important website. Look at our high quality and cheap web services review and recommendation here.
Andrew Loh is the owner of Cheap Web Hosting Reviews, a website that provide complete and detailed review of cheap web hosting services.
|
|
