What You Need To Know About Web Hosting

Saturday, 07 November 2009

What is web hosting?

You and almost everyone else may have already heard of web hosting but do you actually know what it means? Most people know that a web host is needed if you would like to have your own website up and running. So what exactly is web hosting?

Imagine a community of computers with memory capacities large enough to contain all the data on each and every web page so that it is accessible to everyone at any given point in time. That is the basic concept you need to understand about web hosting. It is part of a whole system of computers working together making the Internet possible.

So why not use a personal computer instead? First of all, a personal computer is not built to process  massive traffic of data. It has very limited memory, one that is most certainly unable to keep up with the pace of thousands and thousands of web pages accessed each minute. A personal computer would also be inaccessible should it experience a malfunction or a shut down.  No one would be able to access any of the web pages at all. And more so, a personal computer would contain private information that you wouldn’t want anyone else to get access to. So your privacy is certainly enough reason in itself to have a separate space for your site.

Do not think that the Internet has a limitless amount of memory available. The amount of space on the Internet is in fact, quite finite. What is rapidly growing is the number of servers that are available. This is the reason why servers or the computers with exceptionally fast and massive memory capacities can afford to charge a price for the service. Memory space is finite.  But because of the ever growing number of servers every day, prices have become more and more competitive. We now have discount web hosting companies available in the market, a welcome addition to the growing industry.

Aside from being a storage space for huge amounts of information, web hosting companies also provide another important and basic service which is Internet connectivity. It is essential that any data stored in the server can be accessed by anyone who wishes to access it.  Now, this is where Internet addresses come in. They need to direct a user to the information. A data center provided by the web host is where the Internet connectivity takes place. The data center can direct information in other servers not owned by a particular host. Doing thus allows you to receive your connectivity through another host’s data center by owning space in another host’s server.

And of course, the there will be database support and other kinds of application development available to help you manage the web server. The web company will set up to be able to host a variety of sites so that these sites can offer specific tools to their market knowing that each site has a particular need in mind.