What are the top features of web hosting?

There are three main stages involved in making your website go live – Designing, developing and hosting the website. At the first phase, a design for your website is determined which includes planning what menus your webpages should have, what the background image should be, what over all look your website should have, how many pages your site should contain and so on.  In short, a Skelton of your website is created during the designing phase. At the second stage, experts program your site and add life to your website design. The third stage is web hosting and this is when your website is uploaded to the Web server. Web hosting services make your website reachable throughout the globe via World Wide Web. Web hosting packages offer you space on the Internet server where you can save your website content. The web hosting companies provide you with an interface or control panel from which the web server can be managed and new scripts can be installed. Few webhosting companies even provide e-commerce solutions to let their customers host online stores in the allotted space.

For personal web pages, only single page hosting would be sufficient. However, more comprehensive packages bundled with database support and application expansion platforms are required to host complex sites. You necessarily do not have to approach a webhosting service provider to host a site, even your network server can be turned to a web server. But you would need high speed internet connection hooked up to the server 24/7, you would have to pay for the public IP you purchase for your web server, bare the maintenance costs and so on. Since running a web server at own is a costly affair, only big corporate go for such a webhosting process. Rest, everyone depends on webhosting companies for their website to go live.

Different types of web hosting

The first type is free web hosting service which comes with restricted services and limited web space. Webhosting companies publish third party advertisements on the sites hosted on free subscription as that’s what brings them income. So, if you are hosting a site for business needs, going for a free service would not be the right choice as you would not want to see someone else’s advertisement on your site.

The next one is Shared web hosting service. This one share the same server with many other sites and it might range from few hundreds to thousands. Normally, a common group of server resources like RAM and the CPU are shared by all sites hosted on a shared web server. In terms of software and updates, these types of service have basic features and are inflexible. Reseller web hosting is another type.  It permits the clients to become web hosts themselves. They could function for specific domains under any types of hosting, conditional on whom they are associated with as a reseller. Reseller’s accounts may vary extremely in size. It’s like you lease out the whole web server, divide the whole space into different portions and rent them out to the public.  Next in line is cloud web hosting. For superior resource utilization, they use multiple servers to host the same content.  They are more dependable as the other computers in the cloud can compensate even when a single piece of hardware stops working. Another advantage of this service is that the users are charged only for the resources consumed by them. Cloud hosting is decentralized, so even the natural calamities or power disruptions can’t affect the cloud hosted sites. On the other hand, since it is not centralized, it might be a problem for users with data security and privacy concerns as they do not have much control on the location of their data.