Web Hosting Guide

It will help you understand about web hosting in general terms.

What is Web Hosting or Website Hosting?

This is a very common question you may want to know about, once you look ahead getting your website built and make it live to the world wide web (Internet).
Once you are ready to get your website built from a web designer, he will ask you if you have web hosting /web space. You can either buy web space from web hosting providers or your website designer may provide you with the same.

Web hosts are web space providers who deals is selling or renting servers spaces which are connected to the internet 24×7. Web hosts manage their powerful web server in various data centres.

So basically Web Server is a very high-end computer, loaded with operating system Windows Server edition or Linux. Depending upon the platform they manage and sell. Connected with very high-speed internet and high-end link, they provide space on the hard drive of their web server for your websites. Your website once hosted on that server, need a domain name, which points to that server, where all the physical files of your websites are located.

Domain name is just like an address to that web server. When someone types your domain name in a web browser (eg. www.google.com, www.vertidesk.com) that address then sends the request to the concerned server and fetches data and displays your website in the web browser.

The web host may provide various plans and packages to host a website, it depends on the requirement how or on which platform your site is built. Below are the basic features a web hosting company provides.

Domain name (website name, which points to the server)
Web Space (where files of your website resides)
Bandwidth (amount of internet data consumed over a period of time)
Uptime/Reliability (web server must be online 24×7 or at least 99.6%)
Programming support (let you build website with HTML, PHP, .net frameworks)

Type of Web Hosting

Shared Web Hosting
Dedicated Web Hosting
Cloud Hosting
VPS Hosting

What type of Hosting do you need?

Depending on the framework you or your designer has used to build a website, amount of traffic and web space required, you can opt for the web hosting plans.

Generally, a basic website of 5-10 pages won’t consume much web space, let’s say about 100mb or even a less, and the amount of traffic for new website lets say about 1-5gb of monthly bandwidth would be sufficient. Most hosting provider provide basic hosting package on shared hosting environment, it means there are other websites hosted on the same web server. This will help keep the cost of hosting package very low. You can opt for Basic Hosting plan on a Linux server if your website is static HTML or PHP based and upgrade to higher specification hosting or even a Dedicated server as your site grows. Some hosts do provide unlimited web space and unlimited bandwidth, but they may limit other resources to counter server / hosting misuse.

Windows hosting may be slightly costlier due to licensing and other add-ons if required and recommended when you have .net framework used to build your website.

In Brief:
Basic Hosting Package most web hosts provide 1gb or more web space along with 5-10gb monthly bandwidth.
You can upgrade web hosting package your website and traffic grow.