Web pages basically consist of text and images. Generically, the information contained by these files is called content. The look of the web page is called design. In order to be accessible to online users, all these files must be stored on a web server. You can think of web servers as computers storing the files of tens or hundreds of web sites. These computers are all connected to the Internet through high-speed connection. When you access a web page, your browser connects to the web server that stores that page and downloads it to your computer.

So a web server is a must when you plan to share your web site content with online users via the Internet. There are thousands of web servers in the world, and there are companies that own them. Such a company is called web-hosting provider.

A web-hosting provider can have dozens of web servers hosting thousands of web sites. The web server computers are found usually in large numbers and are all housed in special buildings or sections of buildings called data center . Apart from the high-speed Internet connection, these locations are set up to ensure the optimum operational conditions and security for the web servers. HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning) control, fire protection, virus protection, data backup facility, power backup, even autonomy in case of disaster. Another term for the web servers in the data center is a web farm.

To be able to run your site properly you need a space on the web server to store your data and an Internet connection to it. The amount of data available to you on a web server is simply referred as space and is usually quantified in MB. The Internet connection needed so that your web site can be accessed online is referred as bandwidth and is also measured in MB or even GB.

Having the glimpse of the basics, it must be said that different web-hosting providers offer different space and bandwidth. Space and bandwidth are usually the main characteristics of a web-hosting plan.

The terminology associated with web hosting can be quite dazzling: virtual web hosting, dedicated hosting; co-locating hosting, shared hosting reseller hosting.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting or virtual web hosting are two terms for the same thing. Shared web hosting means that on a web server are hosted many web sites that all have a defined quota of HDD space and bandwidth. They all run simultaneously and there can be from hundreds to thousands of web sites on the same web server. Given the high number of web sites should you worry about exceeding the performance of the web server, issue better known as slow server response, meaning that your visitors will have to wait too long for your web pages to load. That is usually not a real problem when dealing with serious web hosting providers, because the operational parameters of the web servers are monitored and appropriate actions will be taken in order to maintain the level of service contracted.

The greater number of web sites sharing the resources of a web server (HDD space, bandwidth, memory, CPU time), the web hosting provider can afford to offer its services at a lower cost. A minus would be that, even with high level of service, you will have to accept a slower server response time when choosing shared web hosting.

Reseller Web Hosting

When web-hosting providers offer their services, typically with a discount, to a third-party (a reseller that will thus become a web-hosting provider itself) and the latter subsequently offers web-hosting services under his branding. Indeed technically the reseller web hosting is very similar to shared web hosting, as many web sites end up sharing space and bandwidth on the same web server. The resellers usually are web designers or web developers who offer web hosting services as part of their integrated services. As the web-hosting provider offers resellers important discounts, the price they can offer is among the smallest in the industry.

Compared with the shared web hosting, this system has technical support problem. It takes time and communication problems may occur on the course of your problem from the reseller to the web-hosting provider. Unless your site is a personal web site or non-commercial one, this poor support issue is enough to not consider this your primary option.

Continuing this line of thought, how can you distinguish a reseller from a real web-hosting provider? It's not the professional design of the web site, not even the support contact facilities offered as may resellers might have contracts with the provider on the technical support and the person taking your calls might be working for the provider and identify himself to you as an employee of the reseller. Solid company information is made available usually only by serious providers. The price, that can get as low as under 5$/month is another hint, but you should consider it carefully with prices dropping through the industry.

Dedicated Web Hosting

In dedicated web hosting one single web server is rented to a single customer. Although this is the common belief, web-hosting providers usually divide a single web server computer between up to three customers. On the other hand there are web-hosting providers that actually give an entire web server to a customer. Even with three customers sharing the web server, the dedicated web hosting option offers the customers the option to host more than one web site, configure the software to best meet the needs of his site or scale the available bandwidth.

The high prices combined with the availability of resources recommend this type of web hosting for highly important web sites such as e-commerce sites

Co-location Web Hosting

Co-locating web hosting is similar with dedicated web hosting. The main difference is that while in dedicated web hosting the web server computer belongs to the web-hosting provider and is only rented by the customer, in co-locating web hosting the customer owns the web server computer. The web-hosting provider only houses the web server computer and sells bandwidth to the customer. This gives the customer using co-locating web hosting full control of the web server combined with the security of the data center.

Now you should be equipped with the necessary information to decide on you web hosting. You shouldn't try and find the lowest price possible, but give some extra thought to the quality of service you are buying and to the support offered by a web host provider.

About the Author

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin ( www.hostpinpin.com ), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.

HostPinPin is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting articles, tips, web hosting reviews, compare web hosting plans and more.

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the About and weblinks are kept intact.

All You Need To Know Before Choosing A Web Host

No more speeches about importance of your own domain, no more talks about necessity of having paid hosting. If you think your brand domain name and stable hosting with a number of features and absence of ads are not worth, at least, $50-$150 per year, then you probably want to play games, rather than build online business.

Choosing hosting provider is something similar to choosing the place of your off-line office. Despite the fact that it is as easy to enter the URL and go to web-site that is physically located in Sidney as in Oslo, the final role here plays the speed of connection and stability of the hosting itself.

The problem with hosting comes down to the old statute of running ebusiness - that is RESEARCH before ACT! The easiest thing to do online is to pay money, the hardest is to THINK OVER what I'm paying for! That statement is true with hosting also because you can pay, let's say, $35 monthly for some particular hosting service, without notice that in two mouse clicks there is an hosting offer providing two times better services all for $15 per month only, so you will keep on losing services as well as $20 monthly that accumulates up to $240 annually losses as a Fee for not doing hosting research! Besides you should keep your eyes open for very good discounted offers that could save you 30-50% for the first year of payments.

Phase I - Determining NEEDS

1. Estimate your ebusiness basic requirements: total web-space needed, monthly bandwidth (approximate traffic volume multiplied by the most visited web-pages' total size) and ability to run CGI scripts as a must for every ebusiness.

If it is content rich web-site and example of your first year of hosting may look like this:
· 30-50Mb of disc space;
· 500Mb-1Gb of monthly bandwidth;
· cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts an offer additional services;

If it is sales web-site, your first year of hosting should be something similar to these requirements:
· 50-300Mb of disc space depending on how much info products you are going to sell and therefore upload on your server;
· 1-3Gb of monthly bandwidth;
· cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts an offer additional services;

In particular case with one-two ebooks and three-four pages sales web-site, 10Mb of storage space with 500Mb of monthly bandwidth, in general, is more than enough, if you are not going to expand it, so look closely and examine your potential but remember: you ALWAYS have a chance to expand, but you will NOT be able to get your money back if you overpay for services or web-space you don't need. That is called efficient ebusiness running.

2. Determine additional services that are necessary or preferably to have. Consider among them the following:
- Email aliases
- URL Redirects
- Web Mail
- FTP access/ FTP Accounts
- Web control panel
- Graphic statistics
- Custom error pages
- POP3 Accounts
- Sub-domains
- Autoresponders
- Mailing List(s)
- Password protected directories
- MYSQL database(s)
- Perl
- PHP
- SSI
and
- marketing info & support
- promotional help (SE submissions, free banner impressions)
- shopping cart
- chat
- forum

3. Plan your hosting expenses beforehand. Usually the amount you pay depends on the amount of services you choose, but not always as there are hosting providers, which offer identical services for totally different money. The saying that "You get what you paid for" is not necessarily true, especially what concerns high profit margins internet business. Although hosting service is not pure online as it involves some physical computer systems to be installed, nevertheless paying more for less is extremely possible. In other words, know your budget.

Phase II. Selecting the ONLY ONE!

1. Those who start looking for proper place or business web-site should have one or several possible costs in view that you knew or met positive feedback about. For now just make a note of them and put aside, we will come back for them in the step 3.

2. Now it is time to search among hundreds of offers. Accomplish your search by filling online forms at:

(http://www.google.com)
(http://www.hostcompare.com)
(http://www.findmyhosting.com)
(http://www.findwebspace.com)
(http://www.hostsearch.com/search_main.asp)

Click on advanced/enhanced search option if available, input all your approximate criteria that we determined at the first phase and here we go! Tens if not hundreds of wannabe your host providers at your computer screen in less than a minute.

3. Narrow your search by selecting first en (or more if you have the will and spare time) on every search site page(s) result. Now you should have 50 (or more) host providers as a result of host searching and 2-5 hosting companies you heard and knew about before.

In the next step we will start to compare all of them in order to choose the one that deserves your hard-earned money. This task is being accomplished by simple viewing and testing each of the host providers' web-site. How to test and what things to pay close attention to are explained below, but first eliminate all double hosts if there are any.

4. Knowing your potential market will help you to differentiate some of the host providers by selecting those who are physically located closer to your market. If your auditory is mainly English speaking people then you should think about choosing servers that are located in US. If you are a German restaurant owner running web-site for local market it is not critical, but preferable to put your web-site to web servers that are located in Germany, not in US. I have mentioned web servers instead of hosting providers on purpose, because the hosting provider itself may be located and registered in one place, but having their servers co-located in other city or country, like my own provider situated in Moscow, but the web-site they host, physically co-located at their US servers. If you provide universal services (like web-design) and shoot for the global markets offering Multilanguage site, then physical location of host provider is subsidiary.

5. Then we will remove absolute "losers". The first criterion they won't pass is the look of their web-site. Is it professional or there are amateurish colors with 3 or more banners? If you think the price of their site design is not even worth $100 you may close their site and forget about them. By doing so, you distinguish profitable host providers from those that don't even have $300-1000 to invest in the professional look of their web-site. You may not even read what they wrote on their sites as their appearances tell ten times more about their businesses than no words can.

6. Check technical specifications of the hosting servers that are being offered for your shared hosting. Needless to say that Pentium III 450 Mhz with 1 Gb of RAM, for instance, is worse than Pentium IV 2.2 Ghz with 4 Gb of RAM. Outer channels bandwidth and speed can also give you the image of how established the host provider is. You may not need to know all specifications of routers, connectors or other devices, just ask for specific numbers that are easy to compare. That analysis will also tell what hosts are worth further testing and what aren't.

7. We also need to reassure that our web-site as well as all possible databases won't be vanished due to power supply overload, virus, fire etc. It is important to check what kind of maintenance conditions they offer.
- Do they provide 99,9% uptime guarantee?
- What kind of independent power supply they offer?
- Is there automatic back up option?
- Do they have fire and humidity control systems?

Some host providers wouldn't even bother to tell you about these control systems. You know what to do with them - they go off the list!

8. Next stage is to send them a prewritten email asking for some question. It may be some purposeful inquiry or imaginary one just for testing task. Those who failed to response in 24 hours are off the list also. Remember, that email, due to the "unstable nature" of the internet, may not be even delivered, so write for the second time, if no response again, than they aren't worth the ink to spend on them by crossing their web-site address out of the list :0)
Just carefully tear them out :0)

9. The last test that we run is to check the connection speed of the remaining hosts. You should know how fast the response of your web-site will be.

Two online services would help us in fulfilling this task, namely: (http://www.netmechanic.com/server_check/site_monitoring.htm) this one will check a particular server within 8 hours and email you the report.

(http://www.webhostdir.com/toolkit/comparehosts.asp) allows to compare 4 hosts simultaneously by entering 4 domain names of respective web-sites.

I would suggest testing each host twice. First time to check the response rate of their corporate web-sites, and second time by comparing speed of their clients' web-site as there may be a big difference. Just make sure clients are using approximately the same shared hosting plans.

That is all. By now you should have several options, your gold, silver and bronze hosting winners. You can go ahead in setting up your web-site with anyone you prefer more. Don't lose the rest though, as they may prove to be useful in case some collision occurs with your present "winner". Last thing. When your web-site is online, don't just forget to create additional page for providing your new service - expert analysis of selecting web-hosting.

About the Author
Pavel Lenshin is publisher and web-designer, who offers:
+ Powerful package on how to run Private Info Business
+ Free subscription to the unique NET Business Magazine
+ Free Optimization Report of your Website
(http://www.InfoAlchemist.com)

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