Web Hosting is the process of hosting a site including its important directories, folders, files, images, and other essential contents into a server that has its own physical structure and location. You can’t access a site unless it is hosted on a server. Web Hosting is necessary to publish a website and to make it available all the time. To host a website, you need two things, namely, (1) a server and (2) a domain.
The server is the physical computer that stores your entire website including its root directory. The server gives you storage space to keep data that are served to the users via browser’s request online on the word wide web(www). It always remains open with network connectivity and provides a response against a request made by a user through a browser. When you purchase a web hosting, you rent some storing space allocated by the hosting server for your website.
On the other hand, a domain is needed to connect your site to an IP address that is provided by the hosting provider. When you type the web address of a site and google it, your browser gets connected with and finds out that with the help of a numerical address, namely, IP address. Each domain is mapped to an IP address and during browsing and searching activities, the DNS Manager translates that IP addressing into a domain that visitors can see on display.
So, in a nutshell, web hosting provides you storage space inside a hosting server where you can host your new website including its directories, and contents, and publish it to have access by others with uninterrupted network connectivity. You need to choose a good web hosting provider before making a site. You can do it easily.
How Does Web Hosting Work?
To know ‘How Web Hosting Works’ you have to go through a number of essential tools and pieces of equipment integrated with it. Web Hosting works being integrated with hosting servers, software, network providers, data centers, and other required tools. When you host a site, you purchase a space in the hosting server that includes the server operating system, database management system, scripting language at the application layer, modules, and LAMP stack.
Hosting Server: The hosting server is just a computer that is powerful, provides a lot of space for storage, and always runs with better network connectivity. It provides space for your website and stores its all files and contents in it.
When the hosting server works as a web server, it integrates a software program with it. Suppose you are working online to connect to your website to perform the desired work. What you enter into the address bar of your browser works as a request and reaches the hosting server where your site lives. Now, to give back a proper response to the browser, the website software program( integrated with the hosting server) aka the website server handles the request. The web server reads and accesses the files and displays the proper pots, pages, and other contents to the browser. The web server works as a mediator of the files installed into the hosting server and the current Internet.
The most common web servers are Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, IIS, etc. Most of the servers use Linux as an operating system(OS). It is easy to use and does not need to be technical, as the hosting company itself provides cPanel, installation tab, and other equipment. The most popular CMS like WordPress uses Linux as the operating system.
The website that you are going to host on a server needs a database management system to store data, contents, and other sensitive information. The most popular and easy-to-use database management system is MySQL. Popular content management system(CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc uses MySQL based database management system.
Your website must be interactive and dynamic in order to work as a sender and receiver of information. To acquire this feature, each website uses a certain kind of web application language. In WordPress, PHP is used as a dynamic web application language. It makes it possible to fetch data from the database and send it back to the web server. There are also other web application languages like Ruby or Python.
From the discussions mentioned above, you have understood that:
- Linux is used for the operating system
- Apache is used as a web server.
- MySQL is used as a database.
- PHP is used as a dynamic web application language.
Now, if you take only the first letter of the first word from each line, it constitutes a term like LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP ). This technical term is also referred to as LAMP stack.
Some web servers like Apache and web application language like PHP need more additional modules or plugins to result in better performance. As for example, assume that you have hosted a site whose hosting server is Apache that uses Linux as operating system, MySQL as a database management system, PHP as web application language, and the site’s URL does not have the www prefix. Now, you can apply the Apache mode_ rewrite module.
Features of a good Web Hosting
Whenever you are going to choose a web hosting, you should look at what it provides to its customers. Because choosing a good web hosting provider is an important task for you if you like to host a site. Your website is your own property and you have to take care of it to result in better performance. In this respect, your hosting provider plays a significant role in speed, bandwidth, storage, scalability, accessibility, uptime, support, etc. So, take into account these factors if you want to choose a web hosting provider in order to host and publish your site from that hosting.
Speed: Speed is one of the most crucial factors of a web hosting company. Speed may affect your site either positively or negatively. If your site takes a long time to load, it will have adverse effects on your website and the visitors may leave your site.
Now, Google includes speed as a part of their overall score of the quality of a site. Fast loading enhances your site speed and slow loading decreases your site’s SEO.
Speed of site depends on a lot of factors and some of it depends on the type of hosting you choose. The factors that contribute to site speed are storage device, location of the data center, and Content Delivery Network(CDN). Usage of the disk too affects the loading speed of your site. SSD is better than HDD, as the former loads more quickly than the latter.
The location of the data center is another important factor that affects your site speed. Try to choose a data center that is nearest to your visitors. Your site’s pages load faster if the visitors are nearest to it. So, the nearer the data center, the faster the loading speed.
Content Delivery Network( CDN) is another vital way to enhance site speed. When you use CDN, static contents like images are offloaded to the visitor’s device from the nearest server. It reduces loading time and hastens speed.
Bandwidth: Bandwidth is another factor that you should take into consideration while choosing a web hosting service. Bandwidth refers to the total amount of data flowing from your website to visitors during a specific period. Normally bandwidth is measured per month. Most web hosting companies claim to provide unlimited bandwidth during hosting plan signup, however, it is not unlimited in the real sense. It provides you with as much space as you need in the plan. If you are just a starter, then shared hosting is enough for you. On the other hand, when your site starts to receive thousands of traffic per day, then you need to have more bandwidth. In that case, it becomes an issue. Using CDN is a good option to decrease your bandwidth, as it minifies your assets.
Storage: Have you thought about storage? How much storage do you need for your site? As you are going to purchase a web hosting provider in order to host a website, you should think about storage too. For personal blogging, hobby, or small business-related sites, most of the contents are text-based and images are randomly used. That’s why 2 to 4 GB is enough. On the other hand, if you upload high-resolution image files, video, audio, etc then you need more storage space. Using large videos is not recommended for shared hosting, rather you can use YouTube to upload videos.
Scalability: Scalability is how you manage your site with the web hosting service provider in time of necessity by upgrading to a service. In the beginning, you don’t know how much space you need, which services are more relevant and which you need in the near future. But as time passed, days gone, your site received huge traffic, and you felt the need for some specific services which are much required for you. Under such circumstances, will your web hosting upgrade your site to the specific services without any break to your site and its services?
It may be that you started your site with shared hosting, after some years it started to get thousands of traffic per day. So, you have to upgrade your site to a VPS or Dedicated hosting. This way you need to think about the scalability factor while purchasing a web hosting plan.
Accessibility: Accessibility too somewhat relates to your web hosting service. A good hosting company gives you multiple ways to reach and access your site. SSH access and FTP are such kinds of options that you can use to access your site as a back-end user. Through FTP, you can upload, edit or modify any file of your website. First of all, you get connected to your site through an FTP client from a local computer, download the file, edit it, save it and upload it back to your hosting server.
There are many files, folders, and directories on your WordPress site. You may feel the necessity to change, modify or edit any one of these under certain conditions. Accessibility is, under such conditions, a plus point and you can do your work with ease.
Uptime(reliability):
Reliability is too much important for your site. The site you hosted should be running and available all the time. You can get such kind of service from reliable servers having stable network connectivity. Before choosing a web hosting provider check its uptime history.
Technical Support:
There is no guarantee that everything will work correctly and nothing will go wrong. If anything goes wrong, you need to correct the error to result in better performance and service from your site. Here, technical support is a must. Support may be of various forms such as live chat, ticket, email, or direct call.
5 Types of Web Hosting
There are various types of web hosting out there and each one is different from the other in features, bandwidth, storage, performance, and server capability. Based on a number of factors, web hosting has been classified into the following five types:
- Shared Hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated hosting
- Managed hosting
- Cloud hosting
(1) Shared Hosting:
Shared hosting is the cheapest web hosting used by most small businessmen, bloggers, and small site owners. In such kind of hosting, many websites are hosted on a single powerful server that provides services to all of them.
Pros:
- Price is affordable anyone can pay the such a low cost.
- The server is pre-configured.
- No technical knowledge is required and the webmasters control the technical issues.
- Server administration and maintenance are done by the hosting provider crues.
- Provides control panel.
- Good for small and medium-size businesses.
Also, read the article on:
Cons:
- Not good for sites receiving thousands of traffic per day.
- Storage and bandwidth are limited.
- If your traffic exceeds the limited bandwidth, you have to pay an additional charge for extra usage.
(2)VPS Hosting:
VPS stands for ‘Virtual Private Server’. VPS hosting is a good web hosting where you can share and use the same server with others but you get a separate ‘partition’ for your website. Here, you can use any kind of software and web application language. You can have the facility to increase more bandwidth if needed.
Pros:
- It uses a dedicated server.
- It gives root access to the server.
- You can install any web app or software.
- Easy scalability and high customizability.
Cons:
- Expensive than shared hosting.
- Technical knowledge is a-must to manage servers.
- It has limitations to configuration.
- You have to maintain security.
(3) Dedicated Hosting:
Dedicated hosting is the most powerful web hosting. Here, you have full control over the server, as it is dedicated to you. You can choose the operating system and software that you want to use. Sites dealing with heavy traffic need such kind of hosting.
Pros:
- Full control over server configuration.
- You can have root access to your server.
- High security and reliability.
Cons:
- Price is not affordable for everyone. It is expensive.
- To handle your server properly, you need professional IT personnel.
- Needs regular maintenance.
- Best for site receiving millions of traffic per month.
Also, read Bluehost dedicated hosting
(4) Managed Hosting:
Manage hosting is another kind of web hosting best for those who want to manage everything at the server level such as setting up web apps, expanding data storage, enabling data backup, setting up a disaster recovery plan,s etc. Such kind of hosting is best for a growing site and you don’t need technical stuff.
You can get managed hosting both for WordPress shared hosting and WordPress managed hosting. Also, you can get it for managed VPS hosting.
The most advantages of managed hosting are that you can have:
- Full assistance to set up hardware and software.
- Regular monitoring for security and maintenance.
- Data backup
- Technical support
- Patching and updates
(5) Cloud Hosting:
Nowadays, cloud hosting is one of the best web hosting services. In such kind of hosting, you purchase a small area of a data center consisting of and distributed over many areas of the world. It has great advantages over others such as:
- Higher uptime.
- Greater security
- Unlimited resources to use.
- Scalability and customization.
If you are a beginner or just started a website, then you should not opt for cloud hosting, as it is costly and not needed at that moment. It is useful for those sites which receive millions of traffic per month.
