What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what
you see on your web browser is essentially just a web
page that is downloaded from the web server onto your
web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many
web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts
and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored
on the web servers so that online users can visit your
website.
Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will
need to host your website on a web server. When your website
goes live on the web server, online users can then browse
your website on the Internet. Company that provides the
web servers to host your website is called web hosting
providers.
A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts
up to thousands of websites. For example, the ‘Best
Web Host of the Year 2003’ award winner, iPowerWeb,
is a web hosting company that hosts more than 200,000
websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need
many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to
‘store’ the website. And all these web servers
are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet
connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data
center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers
are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data
center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire
protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections,
computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete
disaster recovery capabilities.
What are the different types of web hosting? There are
different kinds of web hosting companies out there with
different characteristics. The main types of web hosts
can be organized into the following categories:
a. Shared Hosting
In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting),
many websites are sharing the space on the same physical
web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web
server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different
websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web
server is shared by so many websites, will the performance
of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are
usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore
it can support up to a certain number of websites without
any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and
exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can
support, then you will begin to experience a slower response
from the web server.
However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider
will constantly monitor the performance of the web server
and will add new web servers when deem necessary without
sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since
a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing
power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting
provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting
price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting
would have to accept slower server response time. Typically,
shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.
b. Dedicated Hosting
In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned
a specific web server to be used only by one customer.
Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single
customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple
web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater
site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore,
dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically
starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500
per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly
used by high traffic and extremely important website.
c. Co-location hosting
In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web
hosting providers and customers only rent the web server
during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting,
the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed
their web server within the web hosting provider’s
secure data center. In this way, the customer has full
control over their web server and simultaneously benefit
from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided
by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth
and rack space required, typically co-location hosting
range from $500 - $1000 per month.
d. Reseller hosting
In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web
server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount
price, who then resell the web server storage to their
customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including
web designers, web developers, or system integration company
who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement
their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can
receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting
account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are
allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish
its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web
hosting company on the Internet and start selling web
hosting plans under its brand).
To the reseller’s customers, the reseller is the
web host provider. In cases when technical problems such
as server down and access problem arise, the resellers
will have to correspond directly with the actual web host
provider. Due to the communication process taken place
between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual
web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems
will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running
your own personal website or non-profit website and willing
to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller
hosting is generally not a good option.
However, the web hosting market today is filled with
resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So,
how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider
from a reseller? You don’t judge by the availability
of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers
even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number
for co-branded technical support. When the reseller’s
customer calls the number for technical support, the web
host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks
that the support is coming from the reseller directly.
Likewise, don’t be fooled by the professional designed
website alone because it is extremely easy to create a
professional looked business website nowadays.
In general, resellers can be distinguished from their
hosting price and company information. In most cases,
a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information
such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial
background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers
usually do not have solid company background (here is
just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover,
the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per
month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find
genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality
web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 -
$10.
Therefore, you should not strive to find the lowest price
web hosting companies without first considering the quality
of the service and support provided. Don’t expect
to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only
$2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the
other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting
plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high
quality web hosting plans to host your important website.
Look at our high quality and cheap web hosting services
review and recommendation here.
About the Author
Andrew Loh is the owner of Cheap Web Hosting Reviews,
a website that provide complete and detailed review of
cheap web hosting services.
