Beginner Guide to Web Hosting

Web hosting is an idea that is very foreign for new web site owners, especially when they are venturing into developing a web site. They will hear of terms like web domains, web site hosting, web design and graphic design. Shared web site hosting when you understand the concept is pretty easy to understand. To summarize, shared web site hosting is a storage container to hold your ASP files and images.

Those looking to purchase an affordable web hosting service will want to learn the different offerings included with shared web hosting, such as hosting disk space, bandwidth, number of databases provided and types of languages you can use.

Disk Space

Hosting disk space is exactly as the title states, and is similar to the disk space you have on your own PC. This feature indicates the size in GB available to the webmaster to host your JSP files and images you have for your website. Multimedia, such as images will use more of your hosting space, while your text based coded files will take up less disk space. The amount of disk space you are wise to look into purchasing depends ultimately on the file types you will be hosting, and the overall file size of your web site.

Hosting Bandwidth

Transfer amount for web hosting is much like the bandwidth you use for your internet. Each time a file is downloaded from your site, it is added to your total for bandwidth used for your site. Bandwidth will be different depending on the plan, and you will need to select the bandwidth amount you will use based on how much traffic your site receives and the total disk space your site uses.. You will normally find lower offerings of bandwidth all the way up to web hosting service providers giving unlimited hosting plans.

Types of Hosting Servers

The last topic to cover here is the different hosting servers available. The server type will limit the file types, like ASP, that you will be able to host. All hosting servers will run HTML, CSS and JavaScript, since they are handled by web browsers, like Internet Explorer. The main thing to note is Linux hosting is usually cheaper and Linux server hosting with Apache supports the PHP programming language. Windows server hosting runs with IIS and is generally used for Active Server Pages (ASP) files. open source CMS like Drupal run off PHP~Windows is on average more pricier due to the cost associated with purchasing the windows license for the server}.

For your next or first web hosting purchase, ensure to look at all these factors to make a decision.