What is Website Hosting?
If you’re starting to develop a new website then you are likely to have come across the term ‘hosting’ but may not be entirely sure what does Hosting mean. Here is a quick explanation:
Hosting is just a computer on which you store your website.
When you create a document on your home or office computer in a program like Word or Excel, you save it to the hard disk of your computer so that you can open it again later.
A website must also be saved somewhere, but it needs to be available for everyone on the Internet to open and view, not just you. So instead of storing it on your own computer, you can pay a hosting company to store it on their ’server’, a large computer that is connected to the web all day and all night and is designed specifically to ‘host’ websites.
There are all sorts of special features that your hosting company can provide, including an online control panel to manage technical aspects of your website, email administration and even the ability to install web based programs such as WordPress at the click of a button.
However, there are a few basics that you should know about:
Reliability
Many hosting companies will advertise a feature such as 99.9% up time. This means that on average the server (and therefore your website) will be functioning properly 99.9% of the time. No one can guarantee 100% up time, but it is essential to find a reliable host because if your website keeps disappearing offline then your visitors will be lost and it probably would give a bad impression about your business.
Storage Capacity
Storage Capacity is the amount of information that you can store on your hosting account. Simple websites only require a few MegaBytes of storage space but if you have a large site with lots of images, flash, movies, audio files etc then you probably will need a lot more. Many hosting companies now offer Unlimited storage capacity so you don’t need to worry about how big your website grows.
Bandwidth
The visitors to your website will be spread around the world and viewing your site from their own computers. Therefore, in order for them to see your website, your hosting company’s server must send your website information over the web to lots of different computers who are browsing on your website. This requires your hosting server to do work, which is measures by the quantity of data (MB) that it sends monthly. A maximum amount of data per month may be set by your hosting company, and is referred to as bandwidth.
The amount of bandwidth that you need is mainly affected by two things: 1. How many people visit your site and 2. The size of the files on your website. Some hosting companies now offer hosting with unlimited bandwidth.
Compatibility
If you want to host anything more than a very basic site, then you need to ensure that the hosting that you buy is compatible with any softwares that you would like to use. For example, technologies such as WordPress and Magento run on your hosting server to make your website function properly with the features that you’ve chosen.
Just like when you buy a piece of software for your home or office computer, you need to check that your computer meets the operating requirements of the software.
It is easy to check, as your hosting company will be able to tell you whether they can run the technologies that you need.
In addition to website hosting, you should also consider other aspects such as your domain name, brand design, usability and SEO Web Design to ensure that your website is successful in meeting your objectives.
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