Web Hosting

Web hosting companies provide many services such as internet connectivity of both by ftp and http. Web hosting companies also provide data center, a considerable amount of space and necessary connectivity options.

FTP connectivity provides a service which allows you to upload your files with File Transfer Protocol or by a web interface which can be called http connectivity.

The web hosting company shows the files or lets them execute on their server. Personal website hosting is usually free provided that you show their ads on your website or it is cheap. The business web hosting takes money for sure.

The database support and application platform are also supported on business web hosting servers. For example you can use ASP, PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails and ColdFusion etc. on your web server and it works well, whereas it cannot be used on some free web host.

Web hosting also supports content management systems to be installed on their server. You can install a forum management system on your web server which provides you web hosting.

It is the responsibility of your web hosting company to provide you a sufficient control panel to manage the web server. They also provide you support for email. You can use auto responders and other email services on your web hosting server.

Types of Web Hosting

One type of web hosting service we have also discussed before is Free Web Hosting service. It is offered by different companies with limited services. It is not comparable to paid web hosting services.

Another web hosting service is called reseller web hosting. It allows the clients to become web host themselves. It includes different packages of web hosting services.

The other type of web hosting is called shared web hosting. Shared web hosting carries a website placed on the same server as many other websites. The range can be from hundreds to thousands. All the website domains share common server resources, for example RAM and CPU. Feature in this web hosting service can be extensive. Shared web site may be hosted with a reseller also.

You can also use personal web hosting server placed in your own home. A single machine that exists in a private residence can host one or more websites but it usually has consumer-grade internet connection. It is better to use purpose-built machines or old PCs. Some ISPs don’t allow this and refuse to provide static IP address, but you can create an account with a dynamic DNS service. It automatically changes the IP address that a URL points to whenever the actual IP address changes. It is called Home Web Hosting Service.

VPS or virtual private server, which is also known as Virtual Dedicated Server is a web hosting server that divides server resources into other virtual servers. The resources are allocated in such a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. It is based on one to many VPS relationship. In this webhosting service sometimes customers are responsible for maintaining and patching the server.

If you get full control over the server, it is called having a dedicated web hosting service. It can either be self managed or unmanaged. Sometimes the security and maintenance can be the responsibility of the client himself for such a web hosting service.

In colocation web hosting service, the user actually owns the server but the web hosting company takes care of little other measures or none. The website owner or his webmaster has most of the responsibility to take care of such a service in this web hosting plan.

Cloud hosting is comparably new type of web hosting that allows the customers to use the services of their own choice and gets paid for services used-only. So if you access all the services, it does not make any difference to the web hosting service providers, they only notice what services you have used.

Clustered web hosting includes having multiple servers for one website. It is beneficial for better resource utilization in web hosting. A cluster sometimes separates web serving from database hosting capability.