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Web Hosting Made Easy
A web hosting service provider offers a service to individuals and groups to enable them to have their own websites accessible through the World Wide Web. Every person who has a website must contact a web hosting company and rent or purchase a server so their website can be viewed on the web. Without hosting, your site goes nowhere. The web hosting company provides a connection from your site to the Internet. These servers are located in the hosting company’s data center. If they aren’t they are called collocations, but they are still controlled by the hosting company.
Web hosting services can be very diverse. The most basic service are small file hostings where your sites files can be put on the web through File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or via a web interface. There are some Internet Service Providers or ISP’s that do offer free hosting for people who subscribe to them and there are companies that charge a small fee. or sometimes a service can be offered advertised sponsored. Whichever you choose, never was the expression "you get what you pay for" more true. Many hosts even offer free domain names.
If you have a simple personal web page then basic web hosting should work for you. A more detailed site may need a better package that maybe will give you database support and other application development uses such as ASP.NET, PHP and JAVA. With these types of services it lets the owner install or write their own scripts for things like forums and blogs. If you are using ecommerce then SSL is required. You may also want to add a Shopping Cart
Depending on which plan you choose and what company you get it from, the hosting company may give you access to a control panel. Plesk and Hosting Controller are a two examples of this. When using your control panel you are given access to manage your server and write scripts, allowing you to install them as well.
Some hosting company’s will provide you software services like e-commerce. These services are typically used by a bigger company which outsource the network structure to a hosting company. Before choosing a hosting service, you want to make sure that they advertise the most uptime. Uptime is the amount of time a server is functional so your site can be displayed and utilized as much as possible.
Most hosting companies say they offer 99.9 percent uptime but there are some things that can occur such as server restarts, planned or sometimes unplanned maintenance to the hosting company. You really can’t predict when this will happen but it is guaranteed that it will happen at some point. You want to make sure that the downtime is kept to a minimum. If you are making your living from the site, every minute down is a potential lost sale.
If a server is down for a long period of time, some companies will give you a discount off the monthly charge if you are paying for the hosting. Before signing up with a company, ask them about that. Here is the percentage of uptime in ratio to how many hours down your site could be.
• 100% - 0 hours 0 minutes
• 99.9% - 8 hours 46 minutes
• 99.5% - 43 hours 50 minutes
• 99.0% - 87 hours 39 minutes
• 98.0% - 175 hours 19 minutes
Web Hosting needn't be complicated.
For more help and ideas check this this FREE review guide.
And when you are up and running, here is some great FREE advise on how to best promote your site, and get it quickly noticed on Google.
Good Luck
YourDomainUK Team
