Web Hosting Guide

We've all heard of web hosting from time to time, or like most of us we all know what it is or at least we have a very good idea of what web hosting is. Some of us on the other hand do not and that's where this guide will come in handy. We're going to cover what a web host is, the different types of web hosts out there, ways to check out if a host is reputable or not, domain names, different aspects of a host and a whole lot more.

We'll start with the basis and explain what host is and a few things to look for. If we were to search for the term “web host” on Google, we'd return over 85 Million results. That's far too many for me to go through; I'm not to sure about you guys. With web hosting being so saturated, meaning there are so many web hosting companies to choose from, it's hard to determine which are reliable and which aren't.

Before we get into how to choose a web host or what to look out for, let's talk about web hosting and try to understand it a bit more. There are several types of web hosting out there and determining which one to pay for can be a bit daunting for some of us. We'll start by first understand what web hosting is, then we'll talk about each kind type of web hosting so we can better decide which is best for our needs.

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is the act of hosting HTML documents, PHP documents, ASP and so on, on a dedicated computer that will serve them to anyone that is interested in viewing them. They can do much more then this, but this is just a basic understand so we can move forward into the different kinds of web hosting.

Anyone with an internet connection and the right tools can, theoretically, become a web hosting company. We need to educate ourselves on this so we know how to look out for companies that do this exact thing. So if you have an internet connection and you can serve any type of web file or download to the general public, then you could consider yourself a web hosting company.

Now we all know this isn't a good way to do business. There are millions of companies that pay big bucks to house their servers and equipment in DC's (Data Centers) that can provide the type of service to those servers that they need to actually be considered worthy of hosting something for web use.

So now we have a basic understanding about what a web host is, let's take a look at the different types of web hosting services out there today. Many of use will only need one of them, but a few of us may opt for something more expensive as it will tailor to their needs better then something less expensive.

Type of Web Hosts

There are quite a few different types of web hosts out there today that we can choose from, we'll explain each one in the order of importance or should I say experience level. We'll start with the most basic and move up to the most advanced.

• Free Web Hosting
• Shared Web Hosting
• Reseller Web Hosting
• VPS (Virtual Private Server) Managed
• VPS (Virtual Private Server) Unmanaged
• Dedicated Server Managed
• Dedicated Server Unmanaged
• Colocation

There are probable a few that we may be missing, but this is most if not all of them. Now let's go over each one so we can better understand which would be right for our needs.