Friday, September 19, 2008

Web Hosting - Bits and Bytes to Care For

By Ata Ur Rahman

The internet by far is one of the very prominent inventions of the 20th century and has a vast audience. This audience does not believe in any boundaries or borders. The very idea of the internet is the convergence of the whole world onto a single point which is called WEB and this sort of converged world is generically referred to as a Global Village. The idea of the global village really turned out to be very beneficial for businesses and even individuals as many tools of marketing became very easy and low cost. Businesses are now able to market their products or services online over the web and show it to the whole world. This undoubtedly increased their profits and also made their tasks pretty easier. Apart from marketing many other features came with the web. To be precise I would just say "You name it and You have it!"

Just to give you an idea all the marketing tools and other features like Emailing etc are just the end user applications. Basically, on the background there are a lot of technicalities involved both on hardware and software side. Since we are talking about web hosting services so I think I would elaborate much more over the software side primarily and a little bit of the hardware too.

Internet is a network of different networks. Within those networks there are other sub-networks and then divided further and then further. There are various different peripherals and nodes attached to these networks and when you go over the internet and type up a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) then your browser sends a request to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to search out the URL and the location where in the whole world those files are stored. When your ISP finds out the network and the exact storage device where your requested URL is stored then it retrieves the data you requested for and shows it onto your screen. This stuff goes pretty fast as you must know and before you could even think "What the heck is taking so long?" your data is on your screen (if you have a good bandwidth of course) . So this is precisely the whole procedure for the retrieval of your desired data over the internet.

Now Web Hosting Services are the services provided by Web Hosting companies. They offer you a space over the internet. For instance you have bought a domain for your company and now when someone accesses your domain then you want them to see your company's website and all about your company or a graphical intro but when a user types in your URL so it returns without a result even though the domain name does exist but there is no path specified to it. It's Web Hosting Service which provides the path to your domain and when a user types in your URL then it returns with the page you want them to see. So to summarize it all, web hosting is basically the space you buy over the internet where you can store your whole website so it could be retrieved when a user accesses your URL.

A couple of things you should keep in mind before selecting the right web hosting service for your domain. The foremost thing you should look for is the reliability of the service. You should see if the web hosting service provider faces a downtime or not. If there is a lot of downtime then it's really of no use to upload your website with them as during the downtime your website would not get retrieved and when a user tries to access your website and would not be able to then instead of gaining profits you might end up in a loss due to the bad reputation and no one wants that for sure. Look for a service provider with a proper infrastructure for web hosting. If there is a weak infrastructure then the downtime would be excessive. The service provider should offer you a backup storage just in case your primary storage is down so the requests for your website could be redirected to your alternate storage. The other thing you should be cautious about is the services you are getting from the provider. Please make sure to choose a service which gives you a user friendly online portal on which you can upload your files easily and also should be providing Support services as during the web hosting you might encounter a lot of issues and to deal with those issues you might need some help. With the Customer Support you can get all the help required and your web hosting could be made a lot easy.

Nowadays web domain providers also provides web hosting services so it wont be a very tough job to look for a service provider although if you keep above factors in mind then I think you would be able to host a pretty good website with no stress at all!


For further information please visit: http://www.topcompanyreviews.org/webhosting.php

Happy Surfing :)

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