What is a web hosting service
The Web hosting service allows your website to be assessable on the Internet. The website
itself is being hosted on the web server of your web hosting provider, most often located
in a specialized data center. The web hosting providers offer on their web servers uninterrupted
Internet connectivity. Most of them offer also additional services such as domain/subdomain, e-mail,
ftp, databases and the necessary environment for utilizing different programming languages such as:
html, xhtml,php, jawa, perl and others.
All these features determine the price and the quality of the web hosting service.
The most important factors by choosing a web hosting provider
First of all, you should find a web hosting service provider, that supports your website's technology.
For example if your website is a ASP.NET application you must find a company that supports ASP.NET,
otherwise your website won't work. The same applies to all other technologies like PHP,CGI and ASP.
If you have a dynamic website you will need a working database. That's why you should choose a web
hosting provider that supports the database technology you are using, such as: MS SQL, My SQL, Oracle etc.
Next, you should find a web hosting company offering enough and reliable Web Space, Monthly Traffic,
Bandwidth and Server Performance.
A small or medium web site will need between 10 and 100MB of disk space. Sites with many images and
video or audio files need more space than simple text sites.
The bandwidth is equally important. If you have a large website make sure you get enough bandwidth.
An easy way to calculate how much traffic you are going to get is to multiply the average size of your
pages by the amount of page views you are expecting to get.
Example If you have 10 pages and the average size is let's say 20KB, and you are expecting to
get around 10000 page views daily then - 20x10000x30= 6000000 KB, 6000000/1000 = 6000 MB.
So you will have approximately 6000 MB traffic monthly.
Because some visitors will revisit your site, they will have the pages and images cached in their browser,
and they won't have to download the pages/images again.
That's why you may subtract let's say 10% of the result, what makes 6000 - 600 = 5400 MB monthly traffic.
Of course, this is a very rough calculation, but it should give you an idea what to expect.
Even, if all of the above factors are taken into account, if the web hosting servers are with slow performance
or the service's connection speed is slow - then the performance of your website can be ruined.
The web hosting server performance is crucial for every dynamic website. The faster and more
powerful servers are loading faster your website pages, what is the most important for your website visitors.
The connection speeds of the servers have the same influence on the loading time regardless of the server's performance.
Usually this factors cannot be taken into account beforehand, because most web hosting companies
don't supply specific information about their servers' hardware and connection speeds. Most
companies have very fast servers and connections, but there are still some with slower ones.
The last, but not least are their technical support, money back guarantee, costomer reviews etc.
Summary
A web hosting service is a service provided by web hosting companies, allowing your website to be stored
and to be assessable on the Internet 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Each web hosting provider offers a different set of features.
The most important factors, taken in consideration by choosing a web hosting service are:
- Web Space
- Bandwidth
- FTP Support
- Server Scripting Support
- Database Support
- Server Performance
- Connection Speeds
|