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Hosting Services by Sharlee Plett When you save a file on your computer, you store it on your hard drive in a file folder. If you are really new to computers, you might not realize that Windows does it for you and puts it in a folder called "My Documents" or "My Pictures" depending on the type of file you save. When you pay for web hosting, you are renting disk space on the web hosting company's computer. They make a file folder for you on their computer and they give you a user name and password to access your folder. The web hosting company's computer is called a "web server" because it has special software installed on it that makes it possible for other computers to connect to it over the Internet and download the files on it. The software "serves" the requested files to the person asking to look at them or download them. When a visitor comes to your website by typing your website address in their browser, their browser finds your web hosting company's server, which looks in your file folder and finds the file they want to look at. The file is downloaded to a file folder on your website visitor's computer called "Temporary Internet Files" and displays the contents of the file in the browser window. The web hosting company keeps track of all the downloads or data transfers from your site. Each file is a certain size, which is measured in kilobytes. Every time a file is downloaded, the file size amount is added to the total amount downloaded throughout the month. As an example, if you had 100 visitors who downloaded a 100 kilobyte size file from your website in a month, you'd have a total of 10,000 kilobytes of file downloads in a month. This is called bandwidth usage. Hosting companies charge in terms of how much disk-space you rent from them and your bandwidth usage. You are going to pay a lot more for a large amount of disk-space and bandwidth, than for a tiny amount. Hosting companies vary wildly in terms of the quality of their servers, their Internet connections, how much they charge for disk-space and bandwidth and what level of service they offer. Poor quality hosting companies have slow, inexpensive computers and slow connections and overload their servers with too many websites. They usually provide very little support and they have problems staying online because their equipment and facilities are of inferior quality. They may be very cheap or even free, but they are not a good choice for hosting a website unless you really don't care if your website loads slowly and sometimes just isn't available. The better hosting companies use good equipment and have their own high-quality facilities. They have multiple connections to the very fast major backbones. They back up their servers routinely. They offer a substantial amount of disk-space and bandwidth for their monthly fees. They restrict the number of websites hosted on each of their servers to a reasonable number. They provide 24/7 live support. They install all kinds of software on their servers and make all kinds of services available to you at no additional charge. They have training manuals, videos, email support, telephone support and a host of attractive and beneficial features. Many hosting companies offer reseller programs which allow any individual or company to set up their own hosting company. How this works is that the reseller simply rents space and bandwidth and resells it for a profit. The reseller does not own or control the equipment. Hosting through a reseller can be an a really good thing to do, for many resellers are very technically savvy and provide a much higher level of personal service and help than you would ordinarily get, even with the better hosting companies. The trouble with reselling is that some resellers charge the same or more than the parent hosting company and know very little or nothing about hosting. This is a serious problem for you if you can only contact the reseller and you have no way of personally contacting the parent hosting company. |
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