What Is A Web Hosting Service?
If you are new to web hosting (and you must be otherwise why are you reading this article!) you may not fully understand just yet how it all works or fits together. This, hopefully is where I will put the jigsaw pieces on the table and give you the picture on the box so that you can start to put it all together.
Web hosting was explained to me a long time ago as the land you build your site on in a property analogy and seeing as I came from a property developers background made sense to me immediately.
Your house would be your website that you build on a piece of land that you pay rent to a landlord each year and that is the hosting company. Your are free to move your house (website) if the landlord does not keep up the services he has promised to provide or you need to have bigger servers, better security or better continuity of service.
Now depending on how important your house is to you and how deep your pockets are you can rent different places for different prices. You would not expect to live in a penthouse if you only paid a few dollars rent per month but if you paid the money to get a penthouse you would expect much more security and space and uninterrupted service.
The reality of the situation is that your website is a bunch of electronic code that when put together properly looks amazing if you got your design right and will be visited by loads of your prospective audience if you get your SEO and online marketing right.
The electronic data takes up space to hold all the text, images, code, etc and this would be what you will physically give your hosting company to put onto their servers and for them to keep this information available for anyone who wishes to view your site.
If your site (room) is quite small then you will share a server with many other people just like in an apartment block. If your site is larger (house) then you might share with fewer people like on a block. Occasionally you will need to have a dedicated server all to yourself as the size or security of your site demands it and this would be like owning your own estate.
Part 2 can be found here…What Is A Web Hosting Service? Part 2
Squeeze A Few More In Over Here!