Hosting explained

Web Hosts

As explained before, hosting implies a computer, somehow similar to the one you have at home, connected to the Internet, where your website's files reside. This way, people who surf the Internet can access your website. So, if we were to give a definition for a web hosting company, it will be:

Web Host = A service provider with a computer or a network of computers, connected to the Internet, where you can place your web site. A web host basically rents out its computers space and connection to you, so that you can make your web site available on the Internet. Web hosts are responsible for keeping the server (and your website) online, and also maintaining and upgrading it.

Web Hosts usually don't have just one computer or a dozen; they have hundreds of them. A web host's network of computers in a specific location is called a data center. Data centers have fast connections to the Internet, 24/7 monitoring for secure access, UPS and battery back-ups in case of power failures, controlled temperature and humidity and so on, providing an optimal environment for the hardware systems located in the facility.

Depending on your budget and your needs, you can rent from the web host a whole server, you can share the rent on a server with others or you can even buy the server and pay only for the connection and the maintenance. So, when we talk about hosting, we talk about three types of hosting: dedicated hosting, shared hosting and collocated hosting.

Dedicated Hosting.
You have a dedicated server where you can store your website(s). You have remote access on the computer and you can install and update on it any software you want or need. This kind of hosting is suitable for big sites with lot of traffic (and income) because the costs are a little bit higher than, for example, shared hosting.

Shared Hosting.
It means that your website resides on a server along side with other websites. The total space on the computer's hard drive is divided into smaller amounts and you get an amount of that disk space. So, for your website a set amount of disk space and data transfer (bandwidth) will be allocated. Your website will also share the computer's hardware and software resources (the memory, the CPU, the database server, etc.), but rest assured, your information will remain confidential. No user/website can access the files of another user/website residing on the same server. This type of hosting is the cheapest of the three types presented, but it's good enough for almost 95% of the people looking for a web host.

Collocated hosting.
It's similar to dedicated hosting with the difference that you actually own the server, so, beside software upgrades, you can buy hardware upgrades too (more memory, larger hard drives, etc.). The advantage is that the server stays in protected environment, with optimal connections to the Internet, rather than staying in an office or at home.

So what web hosting plan is the right plan for me? We will discuss this in the next article: Determining your needs. You'll learn how to "analyze" hosting offers, how to compare them and how to choose what's best for you. Until then there are a few basic common features that all web hosting plans have. Here are a few concepts that are important for you to understand

Windows or Linux Hosting?
Or in other words, the hosting server's operating system. As you know, and if you don't, you just found out, beside Microsoft Windows there are others operating systems, like Mac OS, Linux, Sun's Solaris, etc. The most popular choices for hosting servers are: Linux/Unix with Apache as web server and Windows and its IIS service (Internet Information Server). Some say that Linux is the server of choice due to greater stability and security; others say that Windows is catching up on Linux. We are not here to get in a Linux-Windows fight.

When choosing a server type you have to consider the programming languages that will be used by you or your programmers' team to build the site. Both type of described servers work with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which are the basic programming languages for any web site. ASPx, MSSQL are a language and database server used in Windows environments, while PHP and MySQL are mainly used on Linux based hosting servers. Conclusion: choose your server type based on the programming languages used to build up your web site.

The Price / Space / Bandwidth Trio

Price, disk space and bandwidth are the most important characteristics of a hosting package. That's why all the "short versions" of the hosting offers that you might find will advertise this trio: price per month / storage space / bandwidth.

Disk space.
Disk space, as discussed above, is your allocated amount of space on the hosting server. In case of shared hosting, you have a set amount, in case of collocated or dedicated hosting; you are limited by the size of your installed hard drives. Web pages are usually very small, so you can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of disk space. You should not worry about space unless you have an e-commerce site with a large database of products and images or if your site offers files for downloads or allows the users to upload files. In this case, you have to plan ahead to accommodate these files, so you need to look for hosting packages with appropriate disk space.

Disk space is calculated in bytes, as the disk space on your computer at home. 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1.000 Megabytes (MB) = 1.000.000 Kilobytes (KB). For example, this site occupies 7-8 MB of disk space. A webpage with medium graphics occupies on average 70-80 KB.

Bandwidth.
When people are visiting your website, they are in fact downloading the web pages and images via their web browsers, on their computers. When you are copying or updating files on your website account, you are uploading data on the server. Bandwidth measures all this activity: download and upload. So, bandwidth is somehow related to disk space, because it measures the number of bytes transferred by a visitor when he accesses the site's files. A site that has many pages and images will "consume" more bandwidth for the same amount of visitors (assuming the visitors will browse more than the first page) than a website that has less pages or the pages are mainly text. So, the rule here is "more is better".

Bandwidth is usually charged on a per month basis and it's calculated in MB or GB. There are web hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth and disk space cost money, so it's not possible or at least not economically feasible to offer one of them or both in unlimited amounts. So, why are there offers with unlimited bandwidth? The hosting company is counting on its traffic statistics; around 90% of the websites don't use a great deal of bandwidth (less than 2-3 GB per month) so, on average, the "low bandwidth" sites will compensates for a few "high bandwidth" web sites. We're not saying to avoid hosting plans that offer unlimited bandwidth, maybe the hosting company provides good service, but make sure you read carefully the agreements or the terms of service, as there will probably be a note about what unlimited bandwidth really means. More about this in the Web Hosting Overselling article.

Let's say you have a website with 10 pages, each page sizing on average 80 KB. With an estimated 500 unique visitors flow per day that browse all the pages on your site, you'll be using 80 x 10 x 500 x 30 = 12.000.000 KB (12 GB) bandwidth per month. It's hard to estimate a future bandwidth usage for a site as it depends a lot on if and how quick it gets successful, how many pages are accessed, if the visitors are unique (if not, sometimes, the images are taken from browser's cache memory, so they don't need to be downloaded each time). It's better to look for an offer with a bandwidth amount that has a "buffer" to accommodate a future growth of the site.

So, in this article we have tried to explain the most common characteristics of a hosting offer: disk space and bandwidth. In the next article: Determining your needs we will explore more characteristics in order to try and choose a good hosting offer that best suits your needs.