What is Web Hosting? 256mb2007-02-11 17:39:16

http://webmaster.helpisland.com/hostingintroduction.html

Web hosting providers rent out web space on a monthly or yearly basis just like office space.  So, the definition of web hosting is directly in its name - it is the process of hosting web data.  Essentially web hosting is the real estate industry of the web.  When you have a web site or store data online, it is stored on a server.  A server is nothing more than a computer: generally a high powered machine optimized for internet usage.  Some companies or individuals setup their own hosting operations from scratch, however this can be a costly and time consuming process.  This is why people turn to web hosting providers to store web sites and data.  A web hosting provider is able to purely focus on proper technical maintenance of the server and its connection to the internet.  Instead of worrying about up-keeping complicated server technology, clients can focus on their business and leave the technical work to web hosting professionals. http://webmaster.helpisland.com/hostingintroduction.html

With thousands of web hosting providers and thousands of service offerings, prices vary from free to thousands of dollars a year.  Some companies rely on an expensive rock-solid hosting solution for the success of their business.  Perhaps they provide internet access, or run a high trafficked, high content online store.  Others may simply be using the web to tell people about their company - a web brochure.  Web hosting is not only used for storing web sites however; company databases, email, picture files, mp3’s, movies, and anything that you could put on your computer can be stored on a server.  Once a database or web site is setup, the client is able to easily access their server space using a web publishing tool or an FTP (file transfer protocol) tool. An FTP tool simply put, is an application that allows you to upload files to a server. Many of these tools are free. We will be further elaborating on web publishing later in this article.

Getting a Domain Name (www.yourname.com):

A domain is simply the web address you type into your browser.  For instance you would type http://www.google.com/ in your browser to go to Google’s web site.  The most common extensions are “.com - .net - .org.”, however there are many more. Today, domain names are easy and affordable to reserve.  The average price for a domain is anywhere from $10 to $30.  Domain names are officially managed by the worldwide organization ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).  When you purchase a domain name you purchase it through a registrar that has been accredited by ICANN.  A list of these companies are available at their web site http://www.icann.com/. Many web hosts will reserve your name for you, but the advantage to reserving your domain through a pure domain registrar is in the versatility of being able to switch hosting providers, and most likely get a better price.