What is Web Site Hosting

Many times people have been asking "What is web site hosting?" Usually I answer, that web hosting is a service, provided by hosting companies, which offer acommodation in their server, software, technical maintenance and high speed Internet connection to make possible publishing websites. 

Depending on the sophistication of website, the web server may accomodate just simple static .html files and make them available with minimal processing. Hovewer, modern web applications with extensive content management functionalities need usually little bit more sophisticated data handling in server side. The fastest and scalable data handling is done in running combination of website scripts and database, which saves all texts and links of website.

Graphic handling capabilities in server side are important too - it is really convinient to just upload large picture files to the web server and they are processed there for archieving optimal resolution and file size.

Roughly we may divide web hosting services to: Shared web hosting service, Virtual Dedicated Server, Dedicated hosting service, Managed hosting service, Colocation web hosting service, Cloud hosting, Clustered hosting and Grid hosting. For exact definition of each you may take further look to Wikipedia Web Hosting article.

The formula to determine a system’s availability is relatively easy: Total time = 365 days per year * 24 hours per day * 60 minutes per hour = 525,600 minutes per year. To calculate how many minutes of downtime a system may experience per year, take the uptime guarantee and multiply it by total time in a year.

Average site have couple of hundred pages and will have some thousands visitors each day, the shared web hosting service is best for start. To make finding good host with affordable prices, we wrote some reviews in Web Hosts page to make comparing good companies much easier.

Web Hosting Companies Review

At first sight, there are numerous website hosting companies, which provide great web hosting service. They provide quite technical platform and it is quite tough to make difference between them just by descriptions.   There is no doubt that, detecting the risk of loosing data, poor technical support, sluggish performance of servers or incompatibility with your website may be quite hard. It is specially true, when creating your first website and choosing host provider for it.

Website Hosting Real Needs

Average business websites use no more than 1-2 Gb of disk space and about 5Gb of Bandwidth. Having some extra space just for any case is surely good, but there is little sense of paying for resources, which exceed real usage 10x or even 20x times. It is good if host provider has well diversified price list - you would be start with lower expenses and upgrade your hosting plan flexibly when your website grows and needs more resources.

We found good review about website hosting companies, it also lists top web hosting providers and gives recommendations how to choose between them another company gives even better recommendation of best web hosting service providers. Good reading, if you are looking web hosting company for first time.