About Hosting a Web Site

Introduction

If you plan on developing a website, or opening one for a friend or client, you should know about hosting a website. How it works, what it costs, what are the pros and cons, how to do it for free, how to do it at home, and so on and so forth.

The internet as we know it, is run on web hosting services, as the servers and space required to host a website are provided by web hosting companies, of course major companies such as Apple Google, Amazon and Facebook, provide their own hosting, space and servers.

But what if you want to set up and launch a website? There is a lot to know about hosting a website, so we should get started.

 

History

Hosting is about as old as the internet itself, when the internet first started, users would use their home computers as servers, which this had many downsides, such as off times, slow connections and small storage amounts. The option to create a homemade server is still available today.

Eventually, businesses realized that they could offer servers and storage space to website creators, and with this realization the hosting a website business exploded. Thousands of servers were bought; premises set up; websites created, and hosting a website became a simple matter from then on.

A hosted website can be hosted for as little as three dollars, or as much as $300 dollar for an average sized video or content sharing site.

Of course, many hosting sites own the live version of your data, so if you fail to pay, or something happens to their servers; a hosting company may lose or shut down your website and its data.

But it then came the dawn of free hosting companies, hosting a website became as simple as making it, sites such as Weebly offered users the ability to make and publish their websites directly. And they did so for free. But nothing is for free, the cost of using services such as Weebly mean that user's website names were preceded by the word "Weebly", and so professionals and business have shunned the practice of using free website hosting.

 

Features

There are many features  in a hosting service that you should be aware of, such as: what are their offers? What are their down times? How good is the customer support? Do they help you make a website? How much do they cost? And what's their reputation?

Let's look at each individual feature. Hosting a website may be cheaper if you take advantage of one of their offers, as you can get more bang for you buck that way, and also test out the waters so to speak. All servers suffer form downtime, when hosting a website for you, a good hosting company will inform you before hand, so you can in turn inform your website visitors or do whatever you wish.

Good customer support is essential, as bad customer support will cost you time and productivity. Customer service should reply promptly and be polite yet helpful and knowledgeable.  Cheaper hosting companies usually have terrible customer support, this might not always be the case, but it usually is.

The best way to know if a website helps you make a good website, and what their true costs are,  and how their reputation stand in the hosting a website business, it's best to read external and independent online reviews.

 

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