Personal website hosting

By Staff

The difference between regular web hosts and sub-domain hosts is that the more complex the hosting, the more services they provide. Regular hosts provide highly individualized functionality that guarantees a sound level of quality service. These services are fee-based, ensuring that revenues generated can be allotted for maintenance, service improvement and for providing superior technical support. Hence, the high fees charged. However, low cost regular hosting can be found with regular web hosts. The most basic entry-level fee-based service can be found in "virtual" or "shared" hosting. Shared servers offer clients the ability to host their website on a powerful, professionally managed server, at a low monthly cost. They provide individual websites with redundant connectivity, guaranteed uptime and limitless technical support.

These service providers offer an excellent option for entry-level hosting needs because they are designed to host small-scale e-commerce sites and static web pages. Although, they may not be a good choice to host personal websites because the variety and complexity of services provided is not really needed for the purpose of posting your resume, or sharing pictures with family members. These types of sites are mainly popular amongst first-time website owners who are looking for a reliable web presence without having to possess advanced technical skills. Mainly those who are starting an Internet business would be interested in them. One attractive feature that lures would be business startups id that they allow them have their website hosted on their domain name such as http://www.theirbusinessname.com.

You will find that services vary widely in price and can cost anywhere and users can expect the quality of service to fluctuate based upon the amount paid for the service. Remember that you really do get what you pay for. There is no exception to the rule. Like anything else in life, “buyer beware” becomes the rule and not the exception when purchasing shared hosting services.  If you buy a relatively inexpensive package, then you can expect the quality to reflect the cost of the service. You will not get all the “bells and whistles” that you would get from a regular web host service. Low priced or even free packages for that matter lend themselves to a variety of problems such as more network outages and other unexpected service problems. This may be acceptable to the individual who is looking for simplicity for their non-essential personal site, but it certainly won’t do for a someone trying to conduct a legitimate business on the web.

Once you are done with establishing your business, you need to setup a website to let the world know about it. You need to decide a relevant domain name for your website and then search for a web hosting service. Let us have a look at what exactly web hosting is.

What is web hosting?
Web hosting the service through which you can make your website available to all. It is the process of take some space and bandwidth on rent from some company. The company then publishes your website on a web server. Whenever someone wants to access your website, the request is sent to the web server, to which the web server responds and people can surf through your website.

Types of web hosting

• Shared Hosting - Shared hosting, also known as virtual hosting, means the other websites are also hosted on the same server as yours. It may be so that your website is not that big, targeted for a particular group of people with a limited number of visitors. In that case you will not require the full resources of the web server. Almost all websites on the internet are run on shred servers. Shred hosting is economical than other hosting types, as the resources of the server are split among different clients and so does the cost. The packages are designed at different pay levels so that the users can choose according to their requirements for disk space, bandwidth etc.
• Dedicated Hosting - If you have a huge website with thousands of visitors every day, then renting the entire server all for yourself sounds like a better idea. Renting the complete server is known as dedicated hosting. Some people prefer dedicated servers due to security reasons. The company still owns the machines but now maintains and run it on your behalf. There is something called the semi-dedicated hosting in which the server, unlike the shared hosting, is divided only between two to four clients. The web hosting company makes sure that each has its own separate space with no interference from the other. It falls expensive than shared hosting.
• Server Co-Location - In the above two cases, the web server was maintained and controlled by the web hosting company. If you want full control over the server, you can buy one for yourself and maintain it too. But, it may be so that you do not have sufficient knowledge or resources to keep it safe from power failures, data loss or crashes. It is also very difficult to keep it running 24X7, with a fast and reliable internet connection. In such a situation you can use co-location services. It means that the company now only provides you the security, power supply and internet connection for your own server. It is in no way responsible for maintain the server’s hardware and software. It is less expensive than dedicated hosting.

Windows hosting v/s UNIX hosting
The main difference that lies between the two types of hosting is the operating system that is installed on the rented server. The most popular operating system all over the world is Windows but these days are Macintosh and various versions of Linux are also gaining popularity.

UNIX Hosting
The maximum number of web servers installs any one of the many UNIX variants. UNIX is open source software that was initially developed by universities to enhance their networking. Since then a number of versions have been developed by the programmers, Linux and BSD amongst the most popular ones. UNIX is preferred by the web hosting companies as it allows them to keep their rates low since the operating system and the other software that run on the operating system are available for free. The servers with UNIX installed are considered to be more secured, stable, fast and reliable.

Windows Hosting
Microsoft Windows is the most used operating system in the entire world. Microsoft has developed a number of versions of their operating system specifically according to the use they are to be put to. Similarly, to install on the servers Microsoft has developed the Windows Server 2003. The operating system is a commercial product and one needs to buy a license before using it. This increases the cost of operations as well as the hosting services. Hence, it is a less obvious choice by the companies as well as the clients. Windows is less secured than the UNIX operating system in a networking environment. You need a Windows host mostly if you are building your website, using ASP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion as the scripting languages as these run only on the Windows server.