What is web Hosting?

Web hosting is usually a service provided by hundreds of companies around the world in order for people to have their websites available on the internet. A website as many of you might know is a group of web pages interlinked with each other. A web hosting company helps this website to be accessible from anywhere on the internet. Usually to host these websites you need to have web servers which are always connected to the internet. Now, having your own web server to host your website is very expensive as well as very time consuming and labour intensive. Hence, we give this task of hosting our website to these web hosting companies.

Now, there are several types of web hosting that are provided by several web hosting companies. These several types of web hosting are either based on the type of operating system( Linux or Windows) used on the web server and also the resources and how they are shared among several web hosting accounts!

Based on the operating system used on a web server there are two types of web hosting:
Linux based Web Hosting: A Linux based web hosting uses a Linux based operating system on the web server. The main advantage of the linux based web hosting is the fact that Linux( and its variants) are freely available. So, the operating system costs to the web hosting company is minimal and the web hosting companies usually pass on these minimum costs to you, the user. Hence, Linux based web hosting is cheaper as compared to its counterpart, the Windows Based Web hosting.
Windows Based web hosting: In windows based web hosting, the operating system used on the web server is a Microsoft Windows Server operating system most often Microsoft Windows 2003 Server or Microsoft Windows 2008 Server. The best part about Windows based web hosting is that it can use programming languages like ASP,ASP.NET and PHP, python as well where as in Linux based web hosting it is not possible to use ASP,ASP.NET.

The other major sector by which web hosting can be distingwished is how the resources are divided between the different web sites or between the different web hosting accounts.

Shared Web Hosting: In this type of web hosting, all the resources of a web server like the disk space, the memory (i.e RAM) as well as the bandwidth is shared among several users/ several websites. Now, web servers usually have immense amount of the above resources and hence if your website is the “typical” website then it wont really make any difference if these resources are shared with others. The benefit that the sharing of these resources is that the prices are reduced to a great extend. Shared hosting plans usually start from around 3$ to upto 8$ per month for most companies.

Virtual Private hosting: In virtual private hosting just like shared hosting the resources of a web server are shared among several users. However, virtual private hosting gives a view to the user that his website is the only website hosted on a web server. Some of the features that virtual private hosting gives which shared hosting does not is the access to the root of the server as well as the ability to reboot the server operating system. In virtual private hosting each web hosting account/website is given a separate operating system and you can install various software on it just like you do on your home computer.

Dedicated Web hosting: In dedicated web hosting, the entire web server is yours; just that it is at a different location than yours. In dedicated web hosting, you can have as many websites as you want, you can install the OS and re-install it, you can install and uninstall various softwares. It is your computer at a remote location. Dedicated web hosting is usually used for specific purposes and for high bandwidth websites. There are two types of dedicated web hosting plans:

Managed Dedicated Hosting: In managed dedicated hosting, the web server is managed by a person who is a trained network/system administrator of the web hosting company onsite. This person usually has the required skill and expertise in handling web servers and hence this type of web hosting although a little more expensive prove to be very reliable.

UnManaged Dedicated Hosting: In Unmanaged dedicated web hosting, you or an administrator/system expert from your company has to administer the web server remotely using Remote login.

This article focuses on the basics of web hosting and there are many more types of web hosting which i will be covering in subsequent posts.