What is a web hosting service? How do I choose one?
Some people at Wikipedia have said:
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a serverthey own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.
Basically, a host is a computer where your webpages, images, video, etc are located. When a person types into their web browser http://www.yourcompany.com. Their computer contacts your website and says “hello, would you like to show me anything” and your web host responds immediately with “Yes, you’ve come to the right place and I know what you are looking for…here it is” and sends the information (webpage, images, etc) over to their computer where their browser displays everything the way you intended it to be displayed.
There are different types of web hosts. Some hosting services handle almost everything for you, some you are almost entirely on your own, some are powerful, and some are extremely inexpensive. I will cover some of the most common choices:
Shared Hosting
With a shared host the price is typically the lowest and your “site” is on a computer with MANY (possibly 1000′s) of other sites. The two most popular are HostGator and Bluehost.
Bluehost is the best shared host in my opinion. It is super cheap, has great customer service, will handle decent traffic, and gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth, allows you to host unlimited domains, gives you SSH access, and an extensive amount of optional scripts and ecommerce options. To me, this is the best choice for small to medium sites. It’s only like 4$ a month when you click on a coupon like this!
Once you outgrow the site (database issues, slow response time, etc) then you need to consider a VPS (virtual private server) or a dedicated server.
A good VPS service (like SliceHost) gives you root access so you can really get into the your hands into the system on fast machines, is completely scalable, has no contract and no setup fees. I like slicehost because of the price and performance. Also: Take a look at some of the tutorials available at articles.slicehost.com. The articles, mostly provided by “PickledOnion” are unmatched in their ease of reading, and thoroughness. If you have questions about setting up mySQL, Postfix, Apache, Nginx (basically anything you can thing of) it’s there. I highly recommend this company and those tutorials.
Dedicated.Rackspace
If you have outgrown your VPS, the next logical step is a dedicated server (you are the only one running processes, etc on the system) and Rackspace or The Planet are both great choices. Visit their site for more info.
Cloud
People pay for what they use versus what they can use. Cloud hosting is gaining popularity and revolves around load balancing. It seems like someone new is entering the cloud market everyday.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them! I will try my best to answer them and I am sure others have some insight as well.
