Web Hosting for Beginners

If you have built a web page, or are thinking about creating one, you will need to know about web hosting. Whether you wrote the HTML for your web site yourself or used a program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, and whether your web site is personal or for a business, a web host is usually the easiest way to get your web site out to your audience.

What does a web host do?

A web host is a company that provides space for your web page on their server, which is a very fast computer that is connected to the Internet. Once you have created your web page, you have a variety of free web hosting companies to choose from. Some will help you create your web site, while others just rent you space on their server for your web site. Most web hosting services also provide some support for you as a customer. Web hosting services often promise 99 or 99.9% uptime, meaning your web site should be available most of the time. Of course, maintenance and technical problems will cause occasional downtime for web sites, but ideally these times will be kept to a minimum.
 
What types of web hosting are there?

Web hosting can be on a shared space server or a dedicated server. Shared space web hosting means that you rent space for your web site on a server that is shared by other web sites. Shared space web hosting generally ranges in price from free to about thirty dollars a month. Shared web hosting usually offers between 20 and 200 megs of space, with 20 megs being equal to around 1000 web pages of text. Images and video use up more megs. Free shared web hosting provides minimal support and often uses advertising placed on your web site to keep the service free. Dedicated hosting means that your web site has its own server and that you have control of the server and may be responsible for its security and maintenance. Dedicated hosting is usually only necessary if you have a very large web site that gets a lot of business every day, such as a large company site, and it can cost hundreds of dollars a month.

Domain and subdomain names

Domain or subdomain names are the names that most people type in to get to a website, like google.com. Web hosting services may include a free subdomain name for your site. This means that if your website is mywebsite.com, and your host is hostwebsite.com, your website's name would be mywebsite.hostwebsite.com. If you want a name for your web site that looks more professional, or is shorter and easier to remember, you can get your own domain name and register it with an ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved site for a small annual fee. In this case your website would simply be mywebsite.com. In addition to the .com suffix, there are others such as .net and .org.

Choosing a web hosting service

When deciding which type of website hosting service to choose, consider your needs and goals as well as the reputation of the web host. If you don't mind the web host's ads and don't need this article has all rights reserved and is copyright by 100 Best much space, a free web host may be perfect. If you want a site that doesn't have outside ads and therefore looks more professional, or want better customer support, it may be worth it to invest in shared space web hosting. If you are launching a huge company web site that will include lots of online business transactions, images, and databases, a dedicated server may be your best option for fast performance.