Thursday, 17 May 2012

The basics of Web Hosting

When you are considering what hosting you need for your website there a quite a few points to consider.  First you need to understand what hosting is and why you need it.  You may have a great website, but it needs to get to people's browsers (like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc).  To do this, the browser sends a request for the website through the ISP (internet service provider) (your broadband provided such as BT, Virgin, Vodafone etc) to the Server.  The Server is another computer (usually a great, powerful beast of a computer) and it gets the webpage request (from you and however many other people are asking for webpages on that server) and sends it back through the ISP to your browser.

The busier the website and other websites on the server, then the greater the demands placed on the server are.  If you have or expect to have an extremely busy site, with a lot of visitors to it requesting a lot of information then you are likely to need your own server, instead of sharing it with other people.  This is called having dedicated server hosting.  It is more expensive, but is worth it if your website is going to crash if lots of people visit it at once.

Most websites do not have such high traffic (number of visitors) and can have a shared server.  This is generally a much cheaper option and suitable for all but the largest of websites.

If you need some advice about what type of hosting package is right for you and your business then speak to Hemel Hempstead Web Designers and we can help you make the right choice.  We offer a range of hosting packages and can include any of the features you may require such as content management systems, e-commerce online shops, website analytics etc.  We can also offer just email hosting to an unlimited number of accounts.  This is a great alternative if you have an existing hosting package, but it doesn't meet all your requirements for email.