Web site hosting services overview
Previous: Website design step by step
To make it possible for the people to access your web site via Internet browser, while using their personal computers, your web site must be placed on a computer that is connected to internet and has web server software running on it. This computer could be your own computer connected to Internet or it could be paid service provided by other company. The service is called hosting service and the company that provides it, is hosting provider.
For one website it is essential to be accessible 24 hours a day 365 days in the year. Otherwise if the website is often not accessible it will lose its visitors and will be skipped by the search engines. So, no point for such web site to exists.
Owner's hosting is affordable for medium and big size companies, who have the resources to arrange high speed internet connection and to hire dedicated IT professionals, system administrators to handle their web site and other computer systems. For an individual and for the small companies in most cases it is much more reasonable to use the services offered by hosting providers.
Considering we need to use hosting provider services the main question is:
How to choose a hosting provider and what kind of hosting package to use?
First of all we have to know whether there is any special requirement regarding the hosting platform. It can be based on Windows or Linux/UNIX operating system. Most of the websites use Linux/UNIX based hosting services, while Windows hosting services are not so widely used yet. It depends very much on what scripting language and what data base is implemented in your website. We will try to summarize it in three simple rules:
- If your web site use one or more of the following: PHP, PERL, mySQL - choose Linux/UNIX hosting solution
- If your web site use: ASP, ASP.NET , Visual Basic , C-Sharp, MS Access data base or Microsoft SQL server - you need Windows based hosting solution
- If your web site does not use any of the above mentioned data bases or scripting languages, then either platform is suitable, but usually Linux based is cheaper and preferable.
Top