Friday, March 21, 2008

How to select right web hosting service provider- Part I

Internet has thrown up many opportunities for promoting one’s business online. If you want to spread your business on web, then you need a website and a professional web hosting service provider for hosting your website on the web.

We will discuss about web hosting and guidelines in selecting suitable web hosting service provider for your hosting needs in a series of four articles.

In this article the first in the series of articles about selecting a right web hosting provider, we will define web hosting and see various types of hosting services available and list out things we need to consider for selecting a web hosting provider.

Web Hosting:

Web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible via the World Wide Web.

Web hosts are companies that provide with server space to host and control your website along with a whole lot of services such as software scripts, shopping carts, and other plug-ins.

Types of hosting:

Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting.

Shared web hosting service: one's Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.

Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider.

Virtual Dedicated Server: dividing a server into virtual servers, where each user feels like they're on their own dedicated server, but they're actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server or VPS.

Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server.

Another type of dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.

Managed hosting service: The web server is leased to the client but he not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows). However, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools.

Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space, electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little or no support directly for their client's machine. The client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization.

Grid hosting: this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more websites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PC's.

Features to look for while selecting a web hosting service provider:

The first thing to do before selecting web host is to exactly know your needs and then go about evaluating the service providers. The features and services which you must look for when selecting the web host are listed below.

01. Reliability and Speed
02. Support
03. Operating Systems
04. Language and Database Support
05. Email capabilities
06. Bandwidth / Traffic
07. Disk space
08. Domain Names
09. User Control Panels
10. E-Commerce Solutions

In this article, we have seen web hosting and various types of hosting services available. We have also listed some of the factors to be considered for selecting a right web hosting service provider. In next article, we shall deal with the factors mentioned above in detail.

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