Domain Web Hosting

If you are about to embark on your first website then you should know that creating the site itself is by far not the only thing that needs to be done. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to belittle the importance of creating the website but it is more obvious and I would like to draw your attention to two other requirement in order to launch a website - you would need to store the website somewhere so that it is access via Internet and you would need an address for that site on the Internet.

What Is A Domain Name?

More or less the domain name can be described exactly like that - the address of the website on the Internet, although if you stick to technicalities, there is a lot more to add and explain. Each domain name can be used by a single website and considering the amount of new websites that see the light of day by the hour, you could easily understand why it is getting harder to find a short domain name that is easy to remember suitable for your particular website.

What Is Domain Web Hosting?

We already explained what the domain name is and what it is used for. Web hosting is basically a service that allows you to upload content (the website files) to a web server that is available on the Internet. Although you may use your own computer for that it is strongly recommended that you use a professional web hosting company since maintaining a server is not for everyone. Depending on the way the server is set up one can differentiate many types of web hosting but the end game is the same - to have the website online. So now that we know what both domain name and web hosting are then we can define domain web hosting. It is when a particular domain name is pointed to a certain web server and to a specific site on that server that we say this domain is hosted.

Although the different types of hosting aim to achieve the same thing it is important to know that depending on the specific type of the service the applications that many run are also different and thus not every website is compatible with every web hosting type.

Probably the most fundamental difference is the operating system running on the server and the most common ones for domain website hosting are Linux-based servers and Windows-based servers. To emphasize the importance of knowing the requirements of your website I will give the following example. If the site is built using ASP which is a server-side script-engine developed by Microsoft, it will definitely need Windows web hosting since no Linux server will support the ASP and the site will simply not work.

Each of these major branches of web hosting services can be divided into countless types and sub-types but I will try to review the most important and common ones so that a beginner can get a basic understanding of what is needed for their website. A starting website is supposed to use less resources since it will not generate lots of traffic and therefore the best option is shared web hosting where many people have accounts on the same server and share its resources. If, however, the website has a requirement for a specific application to run that is not included in the general bundle the web hosting must be provided with root access and VPS hosting is a cheap solution for that. On the other hand a website may fit into all requirements for the shared hosting but simply require more resources due to its complexity or popularity and that calls for semi-dedicated server hosting that will provide you exactly that but at a lower price than getting an entire server. And finally, dedicated server hosting is the ultimate solution that grants you full control over the entire server and even if it seems too costly, it simply the best web hosting service you can get on the Internet.