101 Websites Hosting Basics

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Web hosting is a service of providing online space for storage of web pages. These web pages are made available via World Wide Web. The companies which offer website hosting are known as Web hosts.

The servers on which web site is hosted remain switched on 24 x7. These servers are run by web hosting companies. Each server has its own IP address. Since IP addresses are difficult to remember therefore, webmaster points their domain name to the IP address of the server their website is stored on.

It is not possible to host your website on your local computer, to do so you would have to leave your computer on 24 hours a day. This is not practical and cheaper as well. This is where web hosting companies comes in.

Types of Hosting

The following table describes different types of hosting that can be availed as per the need:

S.N. Hosting Description
1. Shared Hosting
In shared hosting, the hosting company puts thousand of website on the same physical server. Each customer has their own allocation of physical web space and a set of bandwidth limit. As all websites share same physical memory, MYSQL server and Apache server, one website on the server experiencing high traffic load will affect performance of all websites on the server.
2. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
It is also known as Virtual Dedicated Server. It is a server which is partitioned into smaller servers. In this customer is given their own partition, which is installed with its own operating system. Unlike shared hosting, VPS doesn’t share memory or processor time rather it allocates certain amount of memory and CPU to use which means that any problem on a VPS partition on the same drive will not affect other VPS customers.
3. Dedicated Server
In this kind of hosting, single dedicated server is setup for just one customer. It is commonly used by the businesses that need the power, control and security that a dedicated server offers.
4. Reseller Hosting
A reseller acts as a middle man and sells hosting space of someone else’s server.
5. Grid Hosting
Instead of utilizing one server, Grid Hosting spreads resources over a large number of servers. It is quite stable and flexible. The servers can be added or taken away from the grid without crashing the system.