What Does A Web Hosting Mean?
A website contains pages full of text, images, and videos. Web hosting is what makes the website available to a worldwide audience. To make your website available to the general public, all those pages need to be hosted on a web server, which is nothing but a specialized system which stores your website and makes it accessible to users on the internet.
To make this happen, you need purchase space on a web server in order to store your website on it. There are many companies which provide web hosting services and are called web hosts. A web host creates space on their servers for website owners to make their website accessible on the internet.
A lot of web hosts don’t own their own dedicated web servers and rent them from large companies which might own data centers, which is a collection of servers, and in turn, rent out space to people looking to get their website on the internet.
Free Web Hosting
Domain name, Hosting, Content. These are the three major portions to put your website on the Internet. Which incorporates the various registration terms, domain name extensions, hosting phenomena and technical synopsis i.e., FTP, SMTP, PHP, etc., the modest vision of your own website online has now directed into something, confusing and intimidating.
What is the Domain Name and How Do I Get One?
It describes the unique name of your website where visitors see you like google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com. Or address where internet users can access your website. Instead of IP addresses which are difficult to remember domain names are developed.
Various domain name extensions are .com, .net, .org, .io, and more. Every domain name must be unique which a combination of letters and numbers.
WordPress: A site building system for absolute beginners. There are many tools and apps are coming into action which can help you build your website. These usually allow you to log in to your site and create and edit pages, add images, and add features such as shopping carts, forums and so on.
This would be started with the help of WordPress – a free system which helps you build blogs and websites. WordPress is flexible to use, and you don’t have to know any technical knowledge. It also has a unique collection of free themes available – which means it’s easy to make your site look amazingly professional with just a couple of changes done.
WordPress runs in your web browser, no need of downloading any kind of software, and you can edit your website from everyplace in the world. The updating the tool for newer versions is to be performed occasionally.
Types of Web Hosting
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Shared Web Hosting:
In shared hosting, the hosting company puts thousand of the website on the same physical server. Each consumer has their own share of physical web space and a set of limited bandwidth. Distributing the same server, physical memory, and server, on the server experiencing high traffic load will affect the performance of all websites on the server.
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Dedicated Web Hosting:
In a dedicated hosting environment, you have the entire web server to make use of it yourself easily. This allows for faster performance, as you have all the server’s resources entirely with you, also without sharing the resources with other website owners. This also means that you will be authoritative for the cost of server operation entirely. This is the top choice for the websites that need a lot of system resources or require a higher level of security.
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Colocation Web Hosting:
The Biggest advantages of a colocated server are that the individual owns and has complete access to the server at any time. It can be utilized from a remote location while the server is handled in a secure facility with a continuous power supply, internet connectivity, and increased security features.
The disadvantage is that repairs and issues maintenance to the server is to be handled by the individual itself.
Web Hosting Companies
The following are some companies that offer web hosting services:
- BlueHost
- GoDaddy
- HostGator
- Just Host
- BigRock
- SiteGround
Security Considerations
Cybercrime impacts your business by hacking your website and identifies the malpractices of using unique web software and misuses of it by hacking assaults.
Hackers also destroy important information like credit card details and propagate illegal content to your user.
Follow these steps for security:-
- Keep your software updated, it makes your website secure.
- SQL injection-It is easy to insert duplicate code into your query that can be used to manipulate your database such as change tables, get information or delete data.
- Both server side and client side validation are to be performed.
- Make a default configuration for password section maintain a minimum of eight characters, including upper case, lower case, and special character.
- Make a habit of using SSL protocol while passing personal information between website and web server or database.
Which Hosting? Linux or Windows?
Stability is the most concentrated concern for an operating system. Linux sometimes is more secure than windows. They rarely need to be rebooted and most configuration changes can happen without a restart.
On the other hand, Window servers can get unstable when functioning with multiple database, web, and file servers. In the scenario of adding some application or scheduling tasks, the problem tendency is worse.
Going with a Linux server will likely be your best because if you anticipate your solution will be called upon to have near 100% uptime. Also, Linux benefits from being a Unix-based operating system.
Can I Host My Website on My PC?
Yes, But to do so, there are limitations you need to take into consideration:
You should know setting up WWW server software on your computer. That allows Internet users to access the web files on your computer.
Internet service provider supports you running websites on your local computer. Investigate your bandwidth quota.
Your computer has to stay on at all times. Because when you turn it off or reboot, your website will become unavailable.
Your website will load slowly as home internet proxy connections are not designed for serving web pages.
Features of Web Hosting
Some of the most common features a good free web hosting provider should offer:
1. Disk Space and Bandwidth
It is the storage space assigned to you by the hosting provider. It helps in storing the website files including text, images, audio that you use for your website.
2. Bandwidth
Refers the amount of traffic that is allowed to access and leave your website. Access means when a visitor types the website name in the browser and leave means the visitor receives information from your website such as downloading files, audios etc..
3. Website Creator
If you are first time creating the website without any scripting experience, then look for a free web hosting provider that gives you complete information and guideline for creating a new website which provides some templates wherein you can add your own text and images.
4. FTP
File transfer protocols are for transferring your website files from your computer to your free web hosting server or vice versa. This allows you to upload the finished website files which include all the media and text from your computer to the service provider’s server. Also helps in downloading the website files from the hosting server to your computer.24/7 accessibility is given by web hosting provider for FTP.
5. Email
The web hosting service provider has an access to email accounts. The email service should also include POP3, SMTP (client service protocols) access so you can setup and access domain emails using your mobile devices.
6. Resources
Free, reliable telephone and email support free web hosting service should be chosen every time. Since website and email downtime to a minimal, hosting guarantee is communicated 100%. These measures may include the onsite backup power supply, network monitoring, network configurations.
See if your free web hosting provider has these listed somewhere on their website. If not, ask them about it.
7. Pricing
If you are searching for a free web hosting service, then you should expect to pay nothing for all the basic features which are listed in the content given.
Any free web hosting providers that force ads on your website is not acceptable anytime when you are planning to host your website.
8. Amount of Web Space
This describes how much web space the web hosting company will allow you to use for your website. This can vary but generally starts around 100 MB mark and can go up to 1000 or 2000 MB, 100 MB is more than enough. Only few web hosting companies offer more space because they evaluate that the average website comes less than 100 megabytes.
Conclusion
Finally, in this session, we came upon the only introduction for web hosting. Wherein you can learn more concepts and implementations of web hosting providers and SEO concepts. For developing your website and publicizing them on a server for traffic on browser like Google for good ranking signal.