What is Web Hosting

Web hosting services is basically type of internet hosting services which allows the person or the organization to provide their websites accessible to the World Wide Web. In simple words, like you need a shop or showroom from where you do marketing for your product in the same way you need a server where you upload your website which is then accessible to all internet user, means your website is a product and web server acts like a Showroom. You can use your own PC as a web server if it is connected with a network but only for personal web sites where you expect low traffic or you can buy a server for hosting your site but one thing must keep in mind if you are going to have your own server is that you have to maintain it properly and it should up or run 24 hours a day, you should have total knowledge of maintaining a server or you can hire a person to maintain website on server. Another method is to buy space from companies which provide web space on their server. There are many companies which provide space on their server for uploading the website. These companies are called Web Hosts. These companies provide internet connectivity typically in a data centre.

Some companies charged a reasonable fee for providing space in their web server and some companies provide free of cost space. Web Hosting for personal websites which do not have any large traffic can be found for free. The fees for web hosting varies from few rupees to hundreds of rupees totally depend upon your needs. You can decide that how much web space you need on the server. For a small and medium web sites disk space of 10 MB to 100 MB will be sufficient. As you can see that the average size of HTML page may be equal to or less than 1 kb so it is easy to calculate the web space required for the websites. In the similar way you can calculate your monthly traffic by estimating the following things:

1. Number of persons visits your site.
2. Average number page seen by each visitor.
3. Average page size of your websites.

E.g. Lets say 100,000 visitors' visits your website in a month and average size of each page on your site is 10K and each visitor see 5 pages of your site then you will be transferring data an average of 5 GB (100,000 X 10K X 5) per month. So you can plan for 6 GB data transfer for a month.

Mainly larger or commercial sites easily consumed more than 100 GB of a monthly traffic.

Before taking a web space from any company you must read the policies of company. Also consider the following things before hiring the web space of any company:

1. Connection speed: Make sure that the speed of the server you used is good, check what kind of connection your web hosts used, like T3 fiber-optic have speed of 45Mbps which is equivalent to about 2000 traditional (28K) modems or 1000 high speed (56K) modems.  These are connection speeds used on the Internet today:
   
   

   Name	Connection	Speed per second
   Modem	Analog	14.4-56Kb
   D0	Digital (ISDN)	64Kb
   T1	Digital	1.55Mb
   T3	Digital	43Mb
   OC-1	Optical Carrier	52Mb
   OC-2	Optical Carrier	156Mb
   OC-12	Optical Carrier	622Mb
   OC-24	Optical Carrier	1.244Gb
   OC-48	Optical Carrier	2.488Gb

2. Hardware and Software: Check the server used and software used by the internet service provider. The servers used by the company should have powerful backup and they should have license of the software which they used.
3. Security and Stability: Check the security used by service provider; make sure that your website is protected from Viruses and Spams. Also check the Uptime of the service provider. Uptime is the percentage of the total time for which your web site is up and running means it is viewable by the internet user. For example if the hosts has an uptime of 99.0% then your web site will be down for 1 hour for each 100 hours. Most of the companies told you about their uptime earlier and mostly they claim 99.0% or 99.9% uptime. It totally depends upon the hosts whether they refund or not if their performance criteria are not met.
4. Customer Support: Check that the host provides you 24 hour service support so that during any critical situation you can take help of them and do not wait for the next working day.
5. Daily Backup: Make sure that hosts provides daily backup so that you cannot loose your valuable data.
6. Traffic Volume: Study the provider's traffic restrictions. Make sure that you have enough backup if luckily your website's traffic increased and your web site become popular and you have not to pay extra for increased traffic.
7. Bandwidth and Content Restrictions: Check the bandwidth and content restrictions provided by the hosts so that if you want to upload pictures, videos and songs you can easily do so.
8. Email Capabilities: Check that your provider fully supports the email capabilities you need.
9. Database Access: Make sure that you can easily access the database of the service provider whenever you need to update your contents.

You can upload your pages of your web site by using File Transfer Protocol or Web Interface. Almost all the web hosts support the FTP. The web hosts also provide you an interface control panel like cPanel, Plesk for managing the web servers and also for installing the scripts as well as other services like e-mail.

You can pay to your web hosts by credit card, pay pal, money order or through checks or check various options of paying the amount.