| Web
hosting involves the placement of a web site or many
web sites on a server that is connected to the Internet.
The web hosting server is located off site at a web
hosting company that leases the use of the server. The
web hosting company should have two or more separate
connections to the Internet for redundancy. Since very
few web hosting systems need the throughput available
on the Internet connection, the connections are shared
to reduce cost. There are two primary web hosting methods,
virtual web hosting and dedicated web hosting.
Virtual Web Hosting
Virtual
web hosting is where many web sites from different companies
are placed on one server and the server is controlled
by the hosting company. This is the least expensive
way to have a web site as you only are paying to lease
a small portion of the web hosting server. However,
a virtual web hosting server tends to be less reliable
and the available bandwidth is shared among hundreds
of companies. These might be of 2 kinds
Shared Hosting:
These
hosts run server machines hosting from hundreds to thousands
of domains. They give great value if your needs aren't
too high and your budget is relatively small. You usually
get one web domain, private FTP, email, a few gigabytes
of data storage and bandwidth per day but no SSH or
anonymous FTP. If you are just a beginner in web publishing
or do not need sophisticated features, then these should
be ideal for you.
Virtual Dedicated Servers
(VDSs):
VDSs
give you the flexibility of hosting multiple domains
with no extra cost for an expense of a higher monthly
fee than shared hosts. Similar to dedicated servers
but you have "neighbors" that you share the
machine with. You do not "see" your neighbors
but if your site grows much, you will notice that they
are there. They will give you anonymous FTP and SSH/telnet
support for you to logon to the usually UNIX (Linux
or BSD variant) operating systems command console. These
plans are usually twice as expensive as their shared
counterparts.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated
web hosting is where only one company places its web
site on a server and that company controls the administration
of the server. Dedicated web hosting is much more reliable
than virtual web hosting and much more flexible. Since
you control how the server is used you can configure
it to your exact business needs. A dedicated web hosting
server is more expensive to use, but for companies that
rely on the Internet for their business it is normally
a better value. A dedicated web hosting server also
can be part of a cluster to increase throughput and
reliability even further. |
