Understanding the Language of Website Hosting: A Beginners’ Guide
In today’s internet era, owning and operating a website is quite common, easy and affordable too. However, if you are new to the world of data center services and want to get started, you should learn few basic terminologies of web hosting services and how things function. Once you understand these terms and language of hosting, website related decision making will become much easier for you.
Here is a beginners’ guide compiled of everything a beginner needs to know about web hosting:
Terms and Technologies
Domain name: Domains are your website addresses which need to be unique and distinguishing to create an impact. Registering for your domain through a web hosting company is an affordable option when compared to registering alone.
Servers: Servers are the computing machines equipped with all the hardware, software, and applications connected to internet 24x7, storing your mission critical data and making it available on the web.
Data centers: data centers are the state of art facilities which store the servers in a secured and climate controlled environment for the proper functioning of machines.
Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the speed rate at which data is transferred from one point to another. Higher the speed and bandwidth requirements, higher would be the costs.
Uptime: Uptime is the time for which the server is up and running. 99.99% server uptime is considered to be the most ideal.
Technical Support: Once you have started using web hosting services, you may need technical assistance, many of the data center providers offer 24x7 technical support for no cost at all.
Types of Web hosting and data center services
Shared hosting: Shared hosting means sharing the resources of one server among multiple users.
Virtual Servers: Virtual server uses virtualization technology which dividing a physical server into multiple slices where each slice is distributed to clients. Each slice acts as a dedicated server for the users as it functions in an isolated environment keeping away from the neighbors on the same server. This is the best alternative of shared hosting.
Dedicated Servers: An entire server and all of its resources are dedicated to one single client. It is also known as single tenant server. This is one of the costliest server solutions.
Colocation: Colocation services are the offerings where users get to store their servers in the secured and reliable environment of a state of art data center.
Cloud: The client’s data is stored on multiple servers when using cloud solutions which make it the more reliable and persistent solution. Moreover, the users need to pay only for the resource that they use (Pay per use pricing model).
