What is web hosting?

Web hosting is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for a website. It is where all the files that make up your website and e-mail can be found. Hosting removes the need of you having to provide and maintain expensive and complicated Servers. Typically, an individual business hosting its own site would require a high speed connection, the Server hardware and the expertise to set-up and configure a web Server. Using a hosting service allows companies and individuals to get on to the Internet without the expense or effort of maintaining their own Servers.

A number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as BT, Demon, Pipex offer subscribers freespace for a small website that is hosted by one of their computers. Geocities is a website that offers registered visitors similar free space for a Web site. While these services are free, they are also very basic.

Having your website hosted offers many benefits over freespace offered by ISPs:

Support for more advanced features such as CGI, PERL, ASP, PHP etc. You can use your domain name as your web address instead of the long and often hard to remember ISP/freespace one You can use your domain to send and receive e-mail You are not sharing the Servers resources with 1000's of other users

How Much Will It Cost?

With regards to cost, if you're just doing a little experimenting with hosting a website, you may want to consider trying some free web hosting (less reliable but you pay squat).

On the other hand, if you want to do it all up proper the first time around (and not be bothered with having to relocate your site after your free web host tanks) you'll be much more interested in paying a small monthly fee ($10 or less) to have your site hosted professionally. Affordable website hosting is readily available across the net. It's just a matter of finding the best deal with regards to all the options and features that typically accompany a web hosting package.

Types and flavors of web hosting

On a cost basis, shared hosting is always the least expensive. - Shared hosting is generally aimed at beginners and intermediate users (though if your specific application doesn't require CGI or database access advanced users can save tons of money with shared hosting). As the name implies, Shared hosting is "sharing" the hosting environment. Usually your web site lives in a folder along side many other folks web sites, and the same web server process serves up all of the those sites on request. This means any site in a shared that acts as a bandwidth hog will take CPU and disk access time away from other neighboring sites in the environment. Many shared hosting providers work to mitigate these circumstances by controlling the bandwidth, file sizes and overall resource usage available to any one site. Upgrades in a shared hosting generally consist of making additional bandwidth, file size and CGI access available... basically allowing you to take up a higher priority among your neighbors. All in all this is a very good balance of cost versus performance.

Continuing the cost analysis angle; Virtual private hosting is the next major step up - It's the stop gap between shared and dedicated hosting. Virtual hosting still shares a machine or disk, but the web server software and indeed the entire operating system environment is usually isolated for each site in a virtual hosting . So, you might have a computer or disk with 10 sites on it, 10 different web servers for those sites, and 10 isolated operating environments. The advantages include better control of resource allocation and more enforceable distribution (i.e. neighbors who hog CPU and disk time in a shared environment have a more tightly controlled allocation of CPU and disk time in a virtual private server environment, so the number of cycles available to your processes are not diminished... here folks don't have to compete for each second, the allotments are usually fixed). Another advantage is that you usually have robust CGI and database accessibility... and if you have a CGI that accidentally runs an infinite loop, it won't suck up your neighbors CPU bandwidth allocations since the operating system environment is isolated. Consider this same scenario in a shared hosting environment where your CGI experiencing an infinite loop might lock up the system and prevent any other site in that shared environment from being served either ...very bad!

At the top of the cost pyramid is dedicated hosting. - This usually requires you have considerable technical skills at your disposal. Dedicated hosting basically means you have the whole machine or disk to yourself. It also can mean that when your web server falls down, you will have to restart it. Worse, it can mean if your site gets DDOS attacked that you might have to manage most if not all of the strategy to mitigate the attack. While shared hosting providers don't tend to highlight this facet, when one of their sites experiences a DoS attack, because it impacts the rest of the sites in their environment, they are highly motivated to mitigate the attack, and likely have highly skilled administrators available to do so. This is often a hidden advantage to hosting in a shared (or even a virtual private) environment. However, if your site is a frequent target of DOS attacks, your relationship with your hosting provider may be strained to the point of you being booted, or you being charged specifically to help offset the special costs associated with managing your site and it's impact on the rest of the shared users.

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