What is Web Hosting?
Web Hosting is where you rent computer space from a hosting company for your Web Site. The space that a hosting company provides is used to store all of the html, php, javascript, jpg and gif images, audio or video files related to your web site.
Hosting companies normally allocate to you a fixed amount of storage space measured in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes(GB), and a fixed amount of bandwidth, which is also measured in MB or GB. Bandwidth is the amount of data served to visitors to your web site in a given period. Bandwidth is the amount of data that your web host allows to be transferred to and from your web site in a given period.
Most hosting sites offer two kinds of hosting: Shared and Dedicated. For most sites, virtual hosting is all that is required. Virtual hosting (sometimes called shared hosting) means that your website is on a server that is also hosting several other web sites. Shared Hosting is the less expensive option and is suited to small to medium sized websites, whereas dedicated servers are more suited to large sites, with large amounts of traffic.
What do you look for in a Web Host?
Reliability
Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99%.
Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.
The traffic requirements of a typical static website are less than 3GB of bandwidth per month. However adding a blog or audio podcast will increase bandwidth requirements by 10 or 100 fold for video. Your traffic requirements will also grow overtime, as your site becomes better known.
Disk Space
The amount of disk space needed is determined by the kind of web site you will have. Most hosting companies provide at least 500 MB of space. However, if you are distributing audio and video on your web site, look for a host that will provide at least 100 GB of space.
Customer/Technical Support
This is a critical factor when deciding on a host. Look for a company that provides support 24 hours a day, 7days a week (often abbreviated 24/7) all year around. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at
SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart
If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you will want to make sure the host provides these services. These services normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The most important thing is to check to see if the services you require are even available before you commit to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card information on yoursite.
Control Panel
This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account.
What about Free Hosting?
There are some hosting companies that offer free hosting. These usually are advertisement sponsored, meaning they put their advertising on your web site.
There really are a lot of goodhosting companies these days. The following companies all offer the features that you would want in a Host. I recommend doing a little homework to determine the best for your situation.