.CO.NZ domain name overview HD

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Basic Overview of Web Hosting Services

A web hosting service is a service given by companies to individuals and businesses that allocates them space on their server and provides connection to the Internet. In this way, the information that they want to share will be available for all internet users.

In this day and age of the Internet, you can almost find all the information that you need in the World Wide Web. These different types of information can be seen through websites that are uploaded to the Internet. Several individual and businesses see the Internet as a very good way to share relevant information with other people across the world.

In order for this to actualize, these web developers, or simply the people who make websites, need a space in the Internet so their websites will be available for everyone to see. This is the main goal of a web hosting service.

There are several types of web hosting services that are available today. The simplest one is small-scale hosting, which usually deals with personal web pages. It is the process wherein files that are to be place in the web page are uploaded thru the File Transfer Protocol. This type of web hosting service is readily accessible as many companies offer this for free, and it is commonly known as free web hosting service.

Another type of web hosting service is the shared web hosting service where different websites share the same server, thus may share the resources used for web hosting such as the Random Access Memory.

A different type of web hosting service is the dedicated hosting service where the user gets a Web server for himself and also controls it the way he wants to. The server does not necessarily belong to him though. A type of dedicated hosting is the self-managed hosting where the user gets full access and must maintain the dedicated box by him.

A virtual dedicated server is also another type of web hosting service where each user has a virtual server for his webpage. Virtual since this server is actually divided between different users but it is as if there is a personal server for each one.

The most expensive web hosting service is collocation, which is very similar to dedicated web hosting service. The only difference is that the user owns the server and the hosting company just provides the space taken up by the server and its corresponding maintenance.

Managed hosting service is one more web hosting service available for use. The server is usually leased to the user but he is not allowed full control over it to guarantee the quality of their service. Data management is done thru the file transfer protocol.

An added type of web hosting service is the home server where the server is located in a private residence that allows it to host one or more websites using a broadband connection.

These are just some of the web hosting services that are available for individuals and businesses to avail of. Choosing which the best one for your needs is must be thoroughly decided upon since not all web hosting services are free and they differ in the provision of the server.

Web Server and Web Hosting Services – an Overview

Web hosting providers provide the following basic services for web servers – anything else can be considered add-on features in theory, although in practice they are essential to run a successful Internet business or business website.

A web hosting provider should provide the following functionality for your web server:

1. Hard Disk Space.

This is what you are actually renting, for all practical purposes. You need hard disk space on a web server to host your website. A website really consists of a lot of files, much like MSWord documents, or Excel spreadsheets. These files take up hard disk space. The web hosting provider provides you with space so that people around the world who has access to the Internet can access those files on that web server.

The price or hard disks have come down dramatically over the past year or so and it is not unknown for a hosting provider to make provision for packages from 250Megabytes up to 2000 Megabytes and even more.

How much would you need? The average web site that just makes use of static HTML pages need about 5 MB to 10 MB of space. If you use a dynamic website where some of your data is stored in a MySQL database the database will also take up space. These types of sites require more space and anything between 100MB and 250MB should be enough.

If you are going to store emails on your server you need to add these into your calculations. Emails can take up a lot of web space very quickly if people send you large files. You will need to monitor the space taken up by Emails very carefully since I have seen individual mailboxes go up to 50 or 60 MBs very quickly.

If you want to host video or audio files on your server, you will have to make provision for quite a lot more disk space. One audio file can easily take up 30 to 40MB.

2. Bandwidth

Bandwidth depends on your traffic. Every visitor to your website will consume bandwidth since this is what they will use when they open any pages on your site. Once again, if you have video and audio files on your site you will require more bandwidth. A good rule of thumb is to have an allocation of about 100KB (Kilobytes) for every visitor. This means that 500 visitors per month will consume about 50MB of bandwidth – although this is only true for an average site with mostly text and a few pictures. If you have large picture galleries, audio and/or video files you should rather work on 150KB per visitor or even more. Search engine spiders also consume bandwidth! You should monitor your bandwidth usage through your CPanel control panel or your website statistics and make sure that you communicate early enough with your hosting provider in case you need to purchase more bandwidth to prevent penalties and/or lockouts.

3. Access to your site

Under this can be counted access to a control panel, such as CPanel, Plesk or Helm, that will help you with setting up of emails, sub-domains, software installations and your MySQL database if you are running dynamic functionality such as shopping carts, forums, Content Management Systems etc.

You are also going to need FTP access to upload files to your web server. Without being able to use FTP you will not be able to maintain the content on your site (unless you make use of a Content Management System). FTP access is still required even in that case since you will definitely have occasion to have to upload files such as pictures, audio, video and other files to your server.

These are the very basic functionality that a web hosting provider should provide!