What Is Web Hosting and How Does It Work
Web hosting is the service of renting or hiring a space to put up a website on the World Wide Web (www). As a webmaster, you need a web host to publish your site, as it cannot go live on the Internet without web hosting services.
By using a web hosting service, your domain name will be linked to an IP owned by your service provider. And as someone enters your domain name into his browser's address bar, the IP will turn up and your site will be loaded from the web host.
By hosting a site means you’re storing all the pages of your website, which is full of data consisting of texts, images, videos, etc . And, then making them available to computers connected to the Internet.
There are numerous hosting companies in the market, offering you this service for a fee. Such companies operate this business using thousands of computers supported by various hosting software, such as Apache, OS X Server, or Windows Server.
If you want to publish your website, you'll have to approach one of these providers and sign up for a hosting service.
Since there are several hosting companies in the market, it is not a big deal to find a good provider. All you need is to confirm whether the service has a high uptime rate and good technical support.
Before signing up, choose the right package that can fulfil your site’s requirement based on the expected traffic to your site.
Companies offer different types of web hosting plans suitable to the size of the site as well as the site’s resource utilization.
What are the types of web hosting?
Following are some of the common types of web hosting available in the market.
Shared web hosting service
Dedicated hosting service
Shared web hosting service
Shared web hosting service, as the name suggests, is sharing the same server and resources like RAM and CPU by multiple websites. It is meant for a single owner and it comes with one cPanel. You can also host unlimited websites as addon domains according to the plans.
Shared hosting is the most widely used type of hosting service because it suits new websites with minimum needs and has low hosting charges.
With a reseller hosting account, you are allowed to resell hosting to others and run it as a business. Normally, there are 10 to 250 separate cPanel accounts, which can be sold to end-users to host their websites or applications.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A virtual private server (VPS) functions almost like a dedicated server. You may need it when your sites have outgrown shared service limits, in terms of traffic, bandwidth and other resources.
Here also, your site is hosted on the same physical server with other websites. But, this is done by dividing the server into various segments through the virtualization technology.Thus, your site will be blocked off from other users, so that its performance will remain unaffected.
With VPS, you get root access thereby can enjoy more control over the server . You also get more freedom to install the operating system and software you want.
Dedicated hosting service
A dedicated server is a server that is exclusively dedicated to your website. It gives you complete control over everything needed to run the website; from security to the operating system.
However this comes at a higher price and therefore suits mostly large websites with high traffic and resource requirements.
Managed and Unmanaged hosting service
Under managed hosting service, the provider company does the installation, administration, management, and support of a server and application. The company ensures that your websites and software will be live all the time.
On the contrary, with an unmanaged hosting server, running the website will be entirely your responsibility. It will be a do-it-yourself experience. What you get is a server with the Operating System of your choice. And the hosting company is left with the responsibility of operating and maintaining the equipment and the physical environment or the server.
Cloud hosting refers to a network of connected virtual and physical servers hosting a website or applications. It is unlike the traditional hosting,where solutions are deployed on a single server.
It is more flexible and scalable as users can scale as needed. You will be charged only for the services you use and you don’t have to pay for any unused capacity.
Clustered web hosting is hosting your website on multiple servers to strengthen reliability and performance. With servers are added to clusters regularly, it allows the user scalability and flexibility
In an environment of multiple clustered web servers, the site’s performance will remain unaffected even if there is a substantial spike in traffic to the site. Because on such occasions, the increased traffic will be redirected to another best performing server in the cluster.
We hope this article on What is web hosting will help strengthen your understanding about the basics of web hosting.