Free or paid web hosting?Written by Petr Sejba
Just finished your first website? So it's time to look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first qustion probably will be whether to choose free or paid hosting service. Let's have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.Free web hosting: (+) It's for free. You don't need to pay for domain name. (-) Your URL will be something like http://username.freehost.com or http://freehost.com/username. As I noticed above, advantage is that you don't need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in future you can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this problem but it is not point of this article). (-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn't allow it. (-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwith then paid hosts and a lot of them don't offer futures like PHP and MySQL. (-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time. If your free host offers hosting wihtout ads now, don't be surprised when banner or popup appears on your site in future. (-) Sometimes happens that free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choises - pay them or loose your website.
| | Web hosting BasicsWritten by Steve Ashton
So you're about to embark on your first web project and you're wondering where on earth to start? Well, one of first things you'll need is a web hosting package. There are so many out there it can seem daunting to try and choose one. In this article we'll teach you basics to help you make an informed decision.What is Web Hosting? For people to actually view your pages on web, you must have your files located on a "web server". When they visit your site, what they are actually doing is viewing those files. You can rent a little bit of space on web server, or if your site is large, rent an entire server for your site. Each server is assigned an IP address. This is a four number address that is separated by dots. i.e. 127.0.0.1 Every domain name actually points to an IP address and this is how visitors access your files on web server. Once your site is hosted on a webserver, it can be viewed by any computer in world through a web browser. All they need to do is type in your domain name to view your web pages. Your site must be hosted on a web server before it will be available to external visitors. What is a Web Host A Web Host is a company that owns and maintains webservers with purpose of hosting web sites. You rent space from these companies and in return they will maintain and service server. Part of this entails keeping server software current, applying any security patches and ensuring site is always available, known as 'uptime'. To achieve peak performance, these servers are normally housed in specialist 'datacenters' with dedicated high speed connections to ensure that website loading speeds are as high as possible. A lot of web hosting companies will rent space in a large datacenter to save costs. Web Host companies come in all shapes and sizes, from large multinational telecommunications companies to joe bloggs down street with a server in their office. A number of web hosting companies will include a lot of other services to make them a one-stop shop to get yourself on web. This could include domain name registration which ensures your domain name will point to correct IP address as soon as name is registered. If you register your domain name with a different company you will need to specify IP address of your hosting server before anyone is able to view your files. Types of Web Hosting - Shared Hosting
Shared hosting means your site will be hosted on a web server that is also hosting a number of other websites at same time. The server disk space and server resources, i.e. RAM, data transfer is divided up between various clients. Although your site is located on a shared server, your files are still secure and can not be viewed by anyone else who also has their site on that web server.
|
