What is Web Hosting and How is it Used?

The definition of web hosting in it's most basic sense is simple a service provided by a hosting company that allows you to make web pages available to the internet as a whole. Without web hosting you could have pages of HTML ready and lack a way for users on the net to access the pages.

To summarize...HTML pages ready to view and no hosting are HTML pages not viewable via the internet while hosted web pages via a hosting service can be viewed online by users surfing the internet. If you want a web page you are going to need a web hosting provider.

Different Types of Web Hosting

There are many different types of web hosting to fit various needs and situations. Most web hosting accounts can be broke down into two major types...shared hosting and dedicated server hosting.

Shared hosting refers to a configuration that allows many web sites to be hosted on a single server. A server is a computer connected to the internet with a static IP address that can server files to internet users. In this case your HTML files would be served. Shared hosting is usually the cheapest hosting available and popular for personal web sites or small to medium business web sites.

Shared hosting can take a few different forms as well. One of the more versatile forms is called a virtual private server or VPS hosting account. VPS is basically shared hosting except each account on the server is a virtual server unto itself. This gives you much of the flexibility of a dedicated server with the cheaper costs associated with a shared account.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Hosting on a dedicated server is a situation where your website gets the whole computer. All the memory and hard drive space can be used by your website as well as all of the bandwidth available to the server. Both dedicated and VPS accounts tend to require self maintenance and upgrade unless the host specifically provides management in the account type. For this reason VPS and dedicated accounts usually aren't for the new user.

Some Good Hosting providers

The following companies provide solid hosting at good prices. These hosting companies have a mix of the different types of hosting that we have gone over in this article.