Understanding Web Hosting
Websites are made up of web pages that could contain text,
graphics, audio or video. But these files that make up the
website must be hosted or housed somewhere and that somewhere is
a web server. It is from this web server that different
computers from different parts of the world can access your web
pages as long as both the web server and the clients (personal
computers) are online.
Any arrangement that is made to provide features for your web
pages on any web server is what s commonly known as web hosting.
A typical configuration for web hosting comes like this Disk
space - 10MB Bandwidth - 5GB Email - 3 POP email accounts Then
features like Support for php, mysql, access, asp, perl, python
FTP, Shell, Frontpage server extension or dreamweaver
Well, let us break these technical jargons down. The disk space
simply tells you the amount of space that your website is
allowed to make use of on any web server that it is hosted on.
Generally, text take less disk space when compared to graphics
or audio and video. So, depending on what you want to achieve
with your website you select a web hosting package that will be
enough for those files that will eventually make up your website.
The bandwidth takes care of the quantity of data that is allowed
to move from your web server to all computers that may choose to
visit your website. T s based on a monthly quota. An example
will help explain this further let us say Mr A has a website
with a lot of text and few graphics whereas Mr B as a website wt
a lot of graphics and even video on his website. Let us also
assume that the two websites are hosted on a web server with
similar hosting features especially the bandwidth. Mr B's
website is most likely to run out of bandwidth when compared to
Mr A's website assuming the same number of people visit the two
websites. Since bandwidths are based on monthly quotas, once you
run out of bandwidth even if it is the first week of any month,
your website will be shut down until the net month or until you
upgrade to a higher web hosting plan with more bandwidth
allocation.
The email is what almost everyone that has visited yahoo must
have heard about. Our example web hosting plan simply tells you
that you will have up to 5 email accounts attached to your
domain like info@yourdomain.com, chairman@yourdomain.com etc.
Even if a web hosting provider promises unlimited email
addresses, just remember that on that particular server you have
a stipulated disk space to make use of unless you are ok with
say 300 email addresses with the quota large enough to handle
just 2 or 3 email transactions and nothing more.
Php, Perl, Asp, Python are all programming languages that your
web designer or better put your web programmer may make use of
while putting your website together. Mysql or Access are simply
databases your web developer may use in building a database
driven website for your business. FTP is simply a protocol that
allows you to remotely connect to your web server to transfers
files to or from it. Frontpage and Dreamweaver are tools that
are used to build websites very quickly and web hosting plans
that support the extensions make life easy for you because you
can have the software installed on your office or home pc and
then design and transfer your web pages yourself to the web
hosting server.
You may say all these features, acronyms and technical jargons
do not concern you as a business owner. I won't advice you to
think in that direction because sooner than later you will
realize that you need to understand these things if you ever
hope to negotiate favourably for your website project. In any
case you are the one spending the money ands not the web
developer, so naturally it should concern you.
Expensive versus cheap web hosting
Honestly what prompted me to write this piece is the constant
question that all my prospective clients have asked me when
discussing website development for their businesses. "Why are
the web hosting plans on your website expensive?"
I will also provide the same response here and from now on refer
such questions this article on the website instead of spending
time answering the same questions over and over again.
A web server (software program like IIS or Apache) resides in a
computer and serves web pages to client computers that request
web pages from the web server (hence the name web server).
Any hard disk or group of hard disks could make up the total
available disk space on that computer. The total disk space
could be used solely for the web server or could be shared with
other applications like a database server or email server.
For any disk space in question let us say for example we have
100GB disk space available for a web server. This web hosting
arrangement could provide hosting for 200, 500, 10,000 or 50,000
websites.
Let us analyse the possblities
For 200 websites, each website could easily have 500MB disk
space available to it. For 500 websites, each website could
easily have 200MB disk space available to it. For 10,000
websites, each website could easily have 10MB disk space
available to it. For 50,000 websites, each website could easily
have 2MB disk space available to it.
Put differently, you could host any number of websites on any
web serer configuration as a service provider but those that
bear the brunt of such maximum carving out of disk space to
maximize profits are the customers or the website owners. So,
which do you prefer, to have your website comfortably hosting on
a web server that will always have the resources available for
your website or to allow your website fight for resources with
about 50,000 websites.
If you have ever visited a website and instead of seeing the
page you are looking for, you see "the website you are trying to
reach cannot be found on the internet or is not available', then
I have just told you why such messages come up.
Remember that each unique website will have its' own unique set
of visitors and all these activities are on a single machine or
web server. Properly set up web servers will simply stop and
restart itself when all the resources are used or when the
server is too busy to handle additional requests. This built in
functionality (stopping and restarting) prevents the server from
crashing and it is the period this stopping and restarting
process takes place that the same website you visited just some
couple of minutes ago could not be found on the internet.
So, it boils down to what you want as a business owner bearing
in mind that you get what you pay for.
I hope this short piece has helped to arm you with relevant
information that will guide you in making the best decision as
far as web hosting is concerned for your website.