Anyone who wants to set up their website will eventually come across the term “hosting,” but what is hosting? This article will explain the exact meaning and why you need hosting to get your website online.
What is hosting, and why is it needed?
If you decide to create your website, application, or service, in addition to developing design and functionality, you will have to think about where it will be hosted. The stability of the resource, download speed, and security directly depend on the placement.
Hosting is storage that hosts a database of an Internet resource, information about backups and files, and other important information. The hosted resource becomes available on the Internet. For example, web hosting allows the files that make up a website (HTML document, images, and text) to be viewed online. Since the server is always on, you can visit a website at any time and from anywhere in the world.
There are several hosting variants, and in the end, it usually depends on the Internet project which hosting you should choose. The types of hosting are:
- Shared Hosting
- Dedicated (dedicated hosting)
- VPS
- Resellers.
The types of hosting are distinguished by the kind, the technology used for the server, the management level provided, and the additional services offered.
Hosters are under high competitive, cost, and innovation pressure. Therefore, hosting companies need highly automated infrastructure platforms, good data center sites, and creative and, at the same time, secure solutions to maintain the service levels or map the respective business models. Hosters use different servers in this regard. A dedicated server is only used for a specific purpose to provide full performance and all resources for this purpose. It means that one server is available for only one customer. It is a key difference from what is known as shared hosting. Several websites are bundled on just one physical server with this solution variant. Since this generates cost advantages for a hoster, classic web hosting packages of this type are offered comparatively cheaply.
Criteria for choosing a hosting provider
The following key points need to be considered when evaluating a corporate solution provider:
- Accessibility
It is necessary to know the needs of the most remote and technologically detached employees. For professional service companies, this group may include an offshore development team and a team of consultants at various client sites where availability is beyond your control. Therefore, you need a strategic plan that provides possible options for accessing information offline or through other means, such as backup to internal or external servers.
- Working together
The demands of business today not only allow but sometimes force employees to move further and further away from the central office. Thus, effective feedback and collaboration are becoming increasingly important. Cloud tools provide a centralized knowledge base, dashboards, and portals that are just as necessary for collaboration as trivial access to a corporate network from a laptop.
- Internet resource size
The size of a resource is the space it occupies on the server’s disks. If the resource is already running, you can see how much space it takes in the server control panel. For development, size is calculated by a formula based on page cache weight, photo, and CMS revision size.
- Resource load
The more often visitors perform any actions on the resource, the more load-resistant hosting they will need. The speed and power of the server directly depend on the amount of RAM, processor parameters, and the type of hard disk.