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.
