Hosting Unmasked

You have a concept that you wish to convert into a website? Your first move should be to keep your enthusiasm and discover a place for your web site on the web so that it will be always accessible to the whole world.

Where should you host your web site?

Since the number of websites on the Internet has risen exponentially over the last couple of years, the demand for web hosting services has also lead to the birth of countless hosting firms. These are companies that offer you hard drive storage space for your own web site on their web servers.

Sorts of web hosting services

The reach of hosting services fluctuates tremendously, so do the demands of the web site proprietors. The most basic hosting type is the small-scale file hosting solution, where files can be uploaded using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a web-based GUI. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer this service free of charge. Personal website owners and firms can also obtain hosting services from different hosting vendors. Personal web hosting services are typically either free, advertisement-supported, or affordably priced. Business website hosting services usually cost more, but due to the immense competition on the market, a growing number of hosting service providers, like us at Dornan Hosting, provide business website hosting services at moderate prices and with flexible billing intervals.

Sorts of web sites and their prerequisites

The free-of-charge web hosting solution is normally sufficient for personal web sites like portfolios or online blogs. A busier web site, such as a social networking website or a corporate portal, needs a more advanced hosting platform that provides database support and application development platforms (for example PHP). If you want to host a web shop, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be supported by the hosting provider of your choosing. Now, SSL certificates are provided by the majority of web hosting distributors.

The hosting Control Panel

The hosting supplier normally also offers a hosting Control Panel user interface for administering your web content, electronic mail accounts, electronic mail aliases, domains, DNS records, and so on.

Service reliability

When choosing a hosting distributor, website availability is a very vital criterion. The accessibility of a web site is estimated on a yearly basis by taking into consideration the time when the web site is publicly available and discoverable online. Network and service availability guarantees, therefore, should be carefully considered when ordering a website hosting plan. You should double-check the service-level agreements and the Terms of Service of the hosting packages provider of your choice in advance. Finding online reviews from existing customers is also a very reasonable step before you reach a decision to register.

The shared hosting solution

The most widely used and modestly priced type of web hosting service is the shared hosting solution. It includes 24-7-365 support, which is an enormous benefit for users who do not want to deal with server maintenance procedures, but could also hinder customers who want to exercise more authority over the hosting server. For such users, a VPSs or a dedicated packages would be more appropriate. Most popular apps and scripts work fine on a shared server. What's more, the shared hosting solution is more affordable than other kinds of hosting solutions, such as the dedicated hosting, because the web hosting provider splits the web hosting server among multiple clients. The shared hosting solution usually includes usage restrictions that guarantee that the separate users do not intervene with each other and that the shared hosting server remains stable.

Handling your shared website hosting account

Shared website hosting packages typically offer a web-based web hosting Control Panel GUI, like cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, etc. The majority of the big web hosting companies, again like us at Dornan Hosting, avail of their own custom-designed hosting Control Panel user interface.

Web server maintenance

With the shared web hosting solution, the web hosting supplier is responsible for managing the web and electronic mail servers, for installing server software, software updates and patches, and for providing technical support to its clients. Most web servers are based on the Linux OS. The hosting provider's administrators are in charge of keeping the OS up to date, unless you have a dedicated web hosting server and full server root access.