First and foremost, for non-IT savvy, it might be a little tough
for them to comprehend the meaning of web hosting. I believe if
you search it on any search engine, of course there will be
answer and explanation for them. But, how far do you really
understand? Honestly, when I first get to know this term few
years back, I had problem understanding myself. Then, I found
one simple explanation that might be easy for people to
understand. So, today, if anyone were to ask me what is "web
hosting", i'd explain as follows...
Imagine you are homeless and you want to rent a room or buy a
house. In order to get a shelter for yourself, you need a room.
So, you imagine yourself as the website and the room as the
hosting that you need to place yourself in. That means your
website need a web hosting. Then, that's the time you start
finding yourself a web hosting provider. Here, web hosting
provider would be the house owner who rents you the room. So, in
order for your website to be available and browsed by Internet
users, you need to make sure your website is hosted in a web
server provided by a web hosting provider.
So, when you finally understand what web hosting is, next will
be the time to find out more about the different types of web
hosting available. You have shared hosting, dedicated hosting,
reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and colocation hosting. You name
it, the Internet has it! So many to remember and
differentiate..so, let's get the ball rolling with...
Shared Hosting Shared hosting means that a web server has
its resources shared by many other websites. Or you can put it
as, in a house, there are many tenants. Usually small or normal
e-commerce businesses will choose this type of hosting. Websites
with high traffic might not be able to choose this type of
hosting due to insufficient webspace.
Dedicated Hosting Dedicated hosting refers to hosting in
which you rent a server from your web hosting provider and will
be placed at your web hosting provider's datacentre. They will
provide software installation and connection to Internet. This
will indicates that the website owner has control over the
server as they don't share it with other websites. In short,
dedicated hosting is where only 1 user hosted on the server
machine and have a full privilege over the server to manage it
by themself. The server machine will be still belongs to the web
hosting provider.
Colocation Hosting Well, this hosting has the features
which are almost the same as dedicated hosting EXCEPT that you
provide your own server and web hosting provider just help you
to plug it into their datacentre. You need to install own
software and hardwares. Everything is DIY.
Reseller Hosting Reseller Hosting is a hosting where the
account owner has the priviledge to allocate the webspace and
bandwidth access and resell them to his clients. This shows that
reseller hosts act like a middleman and is usually not
responsible for any software or hardware intallation. They only
buy webspace and resell to clients.
VPS Hosting VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is
almost the same as dedicated server. Hence, it's sometimes
called Virtual Dedicated Server. Generally, it means that the
account owner has the feeling as though his owns a dedicated
server. In real sense, it's actually separating a physical
server into several independent hosting spaces or VPS-es, each
isolated from the other. This will allow you to create and
manage multiple sites and domains and take full control of your
VPS with root/administrator access which allows you to access
the virtual hard disk, RAM and to reboot your private server
independently from other VPS-es.
Domain Name After we are done with the different types of
hosting, there is something else which I want to touch on. It is
none other than the "domain name". So, ever wonder what is
domain name? Wow, sounds technical? Not really actually. Don't
be scared. Last time, when I saw the words domain name, it
freaked me out too. Now, when I got used to it, it's not that
nerve-wracking after all. So, domain name is just the normal web
address or url (Uniform Resource Locator) you type in the
"address" area when you open a browser. Examples of domain name
are "exabytes.com". You know? Just the normal web address. Well,
since it's a web address, it's a unique name. Hence, there will
be no other same domain name. In fact, domain name is actually
corresponding with numeric IP address. So, every domain name
will have its numeric IP address. For example, the IP address
for exabytes.com is 72.18.131.206
When you see exabytes.com, ever wonder ".com" stands for what?
It actually stands for commercial. Whenever you see .com, .org,
.net or others which ends after the final dot or period (.) of a
url, it is known as top-level domain. It actually tells you what
kind of website it is, indirectly. And the commonly used domain
name extension nowadays will be .org, .net, .com. However, there
are a lot of new domain extension up for grab lately such as
.aero, .info, .museum, and .name. Next in the list that I shall
explain is, Country Level Domain Name. Examples of country level
domain name is exabytes.com.my. It has ".my" as its country code
top-level domain (ccTLD). .my here represents the country
"Malaysia". Of course, different country will have different
ccTLD. For example, .jp stands for Japan, .au for Australia, .ca
for Canada.
There are more to learn in order to excel in web hosting
industry. Hopefully this simple guide will help all those novice
out there. There are other things you need to know as well. But,
it will be in my next article. Cheers!
About the author:
SY Ho is an Online Marketing Executive for
http://www.exabytes.com
