Being in the hosing industry for more than 5 years, I thought I’ll put down a few basics of webhosting… Its just very basic stuff so that a layman can get hold of what is web hosting and how to get a website up and running and what all things he must keep in mind to have a good website.

• What is hosting ?

Its the process of hosting a website or email or DNS or any any data online so that it can be accessed from anywhere through Internet.

• Why should I host a website ?

Many reasons are there.  may be just an experiment .. or You can host a personal blog to blog your ideas or a gallery to showcase your photographs  or you can set up a shop which sells your products or you can start a web business. The importance of a website is its international reach! Finally you will get a domain name of your own.

• I need a website – what should I do ?

A website have 2 parts – first is a domain name and the second is the content.

The domain name is provided by ICANN , an international organisation – sold through resellers. GoDaddy, Enom, PublicDomainRegistry etc are some of the first level domain registrars and most of the other domain registrar that we see are the resellers of them. Once the domain is registered, you need to set up some pages for the website so that you can reflect your ideas or business there. These web pages are files placed in an order at some computer which is capable of displaying them in a specific order.  These computers are called webservers.

So along with the domain name, we need a space to hold our pages – we need to buy them separately or there are service providers who do this both.

• How does a computer know where is the page hosted ?

The internet completely works under certain protocols. For a computer to know where our site is hosted, we must set up DNS.

The webpages are ruled by the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. A internet browser is a tool which helps us to view the pages correctly from internet. It should be able to resolve a particular domain name to an IP address and then search in the server whcih have the IP for a relevant page.

• ie A domain can have only one IP ?

It is the theory. But when site gets busy,  we may need more resources to power the site. Will you believe that ~1000 servers power wikipedia ? So , it will be displating only one IP to the outside world, but internally, there will be a lot of servers / IPs involved to drive what you see…

• Does the server location Important ?

Not really, but the IP is important. Because the reputation of the IP address on which you are hosted can be a deciding factor for search engines or some ISPs to allow your website.

• How will I select my web host ?

That depends on may things :-

1. Your budget, depending on that you should be able to short list your host from a list of providers.

2. What you want to host ( If it is a business site or a personal )

3. What all technologies you need on your website ? ( html only or db driven site ? PHP or asp or Tomcat ? )

4. How much traffic you expect to your site ?

5.  Reputation of the hosts you have short-listed.

6.  Do they provide a personal touch for you or consider you as just a small potato in their basket ?( make some initial mail contact with them and get a feel )

7. Read some review about the selected hosts and enquire about their support. Keep in mind that for a web hosting business, its the support that matters.

8. Ask the short-listed hosts for a 10Mb / 100Mb file so that you can test the download speed.

9. Enquire about their backup policy and make sure that you are thorough with their Terms and conditions.

Once you have done these carefully, the best host will come up from the list

• I need my own emails also!

Ask if the hosts provide email solutions too. Or you can use google Apps . I have felt that for a beginner, servers with cPanel is the best choice if they need to host emails also.

• I have my page ready. How will I upload so that my website will show ‘em ?

You should be provided with an FTP username and password to upload the files.  Only through FTP you can upload or download website contents!

• What are the different types of hosting available  ?

That purely depends on what you need!! If you just need to host a personal  blog or gallery or a small business website, a shared account will do – A shared account is a slice of some space in a server, and some amount of bandwidth for you.  There are many web hosting providers in India which specialise in wordpress hosting, joomla hosting etc.

You may need a VPS or a dedicated server if you have fairly large amount of web content, or your your application is very much sensitive or it is high resource consuming.

• I can get unlimited space and bandwidth for $7 , then why should I go for a dedicated server ?

It is the misconception that everyone have that you need unlimited web space to run your application! Hosting industry is so competitive that there are companies who sell ‘unlimited’ resources for very cheap rate. I dont think its nothing more than overselling of their resources.