What is Hosting and its characteristics . Any person or company that wants to make itself known on the Internet has to hire Hosting. But there are practically hundreds of Hosting providers to choose from and contract web hosting packages that cover current and medium-term needs. If you want to make a good investment, the task of finding the best one can be a confusing process, especially when you are a beginner in hosting. the world of web hosting.
Hosting Terminology. This article aims to make you aware of all the terminology used in the world of Hosting, and will give you the necessary confidence to make the best decision about choosing a reliable web hosting.
When you investigate the plans offered by Hosting providers, you will see that prices vary, as well as the characteristics of the services, such as the amount of disk space, bandwidth, data transfer speed, number of domains. that you can host and the number of email accounts, privacy and security settings, web page design and marketing tools, aspects such as technical support and guaranteed uptime. Knowing what your needs are is essential to making an intelligent choice.
What is Hosting? and their characteristics
What is Hosting ? Hosting (in English it is known as web hosting) is the service offered by a company that is dedicated to the business of web services to Internet users. This service consists of renting space on a physical server that will allow you to store content such as HTML files, dynamic scripts, images, video, or any content accessible via the web.
Let’s take a look at the features that are essential for reliable web hosting:
1. Disk space. A web hosting account has a disk/storage space allocation that is assigned to you by your hosting provider. The amount of storage will be the sum of the content of your web pages, any graphic or audiovisual content, emails, download files, etc. The contracted space must also be sufficient for the log files generated by the server such as error log files, monitoring and visit statistics, etc.
It is possible that you contract a package with additional disk space in order to add more content to the existing one such as images, music, flash, etc. By the way, databases are usually calculated as used space separate from the allocated storage space, but to clear up any doubts it is best to check with your web hosting provider.
2. Data Transfer / Bandwidth . These two features are an important factor in choosing a reliable web hosting. They are similar but different aspects of the same process and they go hand in hand.
Data transfer is the amount of data that is transferred on a monthly basis. Your website may not be accessible after exhausting this value, and it will not be until the next start of the month before the account is reset to zero. Try to estimate how much data transfer your website consumes to always be above this limit. Any mention of an article or content of yours on a high-traffic social network can be catastrophe.
For its part, Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred at a time. So, a lower bandwidth that is allocated will slow down your website, taking longer to load regardless of the visitors’ connection speed. Taking up a lot of bandwidth is expensive because it takes up a lot of server resources and can affect the performance of other clients’ sites on the server. An important factor to consider when choosing a web host is the fact that they can discontinue the domain and close the account without refund if your website consumes high bandwidth, more than allowed.
3. What is Hosting and Domain Name. A domain name (or simply domain) is the name that gives your website a unique identity on the Internet. Said name is an individual and unrepeatable identity. For example: www.site.com is an example of a domain name. Companies that are dedicated to the business of managing and renting domains annually are known as internet domain providers.
4. What is Hosting and Dedicated vs Shared IP Address. An IP address is the numerical address of the web page that tells other computers and servers where to find the server’s host and domain on the Internet.
There are advantages to having a dedicated IP address vs a shared address which are explained below.
Dedicated IP address . It means that your site is the only one on the Internet using that IP address number. The advantages of having a dedicated IP address is that you can get better SEO (search engine optimization) positioning work. Ratings that make your website more visible and easier to find, there are better security and privacy options. A private SSL certificate was created to confirm the identity of a website or server and ensure secure transactions between web servers and browsers. In order to keep customer information secure, a private SSL certificate is required for e-commerce websites that accept credit card payments.
Shared IP address . It means that there could be hundreds of websites on the same server sharing a single IP address. Shared IP addresses make it easier for hosting companies to manage and maintain their servers and offer this feature at a lower cost. The downside to this is that if other websites misuse email (SPAM) the IP address could be blacklisted, as the actions of others can directly affect your website.
The worst that can happen in this scenario is that your website could disappear from search engines and your email could be blocked by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). If you use shared IP addresses, using a shared SSL certificate gives you the benefits of an SSL Certificate at a lower cost and still provides a secure URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Many eCommerce websites offer shared SSL for their client businesses.
5. Email accounts. The email accounts feature is one of the most important and allows companies or businesses that hire a hosting service to use this service to communicate with their clients. Some of the features it offers are customizing email addresses, the capacity of each account, import/export your address book, email accessible via web from a mobile phone or PDA, calendar alerts, mail sending, automatic responses, Email filters that protect you from viruses and spam.
6. Online time guarantee. This is one of the most important features reliable hosting providers can offer you. This guarantee feature means that your website will be available at least 99.9% of the time online. You may not see the problem yet, especially if your business depends heavily on the Internet for sales, but when a website is not available, traffic and potential customers will be attracted to competing sites, which translates into loss. of sales. This guarantee must include network uptime, server uptime, web server, and 24-hour service and support time. of the day 7 days a week (24/7).
7. Control Panel Features. The most important job of a website owner is the creation and development of web pages. The CPanel Control Panel has the tools to upload and manage web pages, domains, subdomains, FTP account management, creation of parked domains, adding domains, directory protection, redirecting visitors to another location, website statistics , data backups, virus protection and spam filters, the tools to maintain your privacy and security.
8. Privacy and security. Communications security as well as unauthorized or sensitive data are a huge problem. Some of the security tools that a web server should include are secure servers using the SSL protocol, SSL certificates, and high-quality software can prevent websites from being vulnerable to direct access to databases and configuration files. , secure payment processing, firewall protection, the use of strong passwords, email encryption and strict privacy policies should be part of the arsenal provided by hosting providers.
9. What is Hosting and Technical Support. Professional hosting providers must have technical support available 24/7. Get a quick response through a support ticket if you have any problems and get immediate help through a live chat service or phone support. Of course, you should be aware that it is unlikely to get a response immediately, generally the acceptable delay is 12 hours, and 2 hours in the most critical cases via email (since your ticket will be in a waiting queue).
10. Tools for building the WEBSITE. The website building tools are an addition that makes it easy for you to create websites even if you do not have knowledge of HTML or programming. This feature is offered as part of a web hosting plan. Among other things, these advanced site creation tools allow you to add: content, a photo album, guestbook, newsletters, blogs, FAQs, forums, galleries and much more.
In this brief tutorial we have given the definition of what Hosting is and the basic features it must have so that it covers the needs that your business requires to function properly while not requiring more advanced features. In other articles we will present more information related to web hosting .