An Introduction

What Is Web Hosting And Why Is It Important?

Welcome to this special report.

First things first, let's take a step back and look at domains.

So - what is a domain?

A domain is an address on the internet. Like:

www.Yahoo.com

Or like:

www.bbc.co.uk

Those are both web site addresses.

The first one www.Yahoo.com is unsurprisingly for the domain Yahoo.com.

The second example www.bbc.co.uk is for the domain bbc.co.uk.

Now, let's say your name is John Smith and you purchased the domain www.JohnSmith.com.

That would be your "address" on the internet.

BUT - this address needs land.

That's where web hosting comes in.

Using a web hosting service would then basically give you the "land" on the internet at the address JohnSmith.com so you can present what you wish at that address.

This is obviously where the analogy with the internet and the real world becomes less accurate. Whereas your address in the real world largely determines what land you have, on the internet, you can point your address (your domain) to land of your choosing.

So even with just one address you could keep trading up as your business grew.

Or as a further example ... this obviously isn't the case, but let's say the BBC website started out with only 10 visitors to the site a day.

So they have their address www.bbc.co.uk and point it to some cheap land on the internet, because they don't need much land to handle 10 people a day. In this example, cheap web hosting would be fine since they wouldn't need much capacity.

And let's fast-forward to now. The address www.bbc.co.uk is probably receiving millions of visitors every single month.

So a small plot of land won't do any more. They now need lots of space for all the visitors.

So as their web traffic (amount of visitors) grew, the BBC kept trading up to suitable land to comfortably support all the visitors they were receiving.

A Web-Hosting Case Study

For a real life example, what would be better than a step by step talk through my own web business ...

I'm writing this report in early 2004, but if we skip back in time a couple of years to 2002, my online business was really just starting.

I'd actually tried several different web hosts (companies that provide web hosting) in the past, and I've now settled with one and stuck with them since they've proven to be both reasonably priced and reliable.

You can find out more about the company at:

www.Pair.com

So I started out at Pair with what they call a "Webmaster Account".

Since they're based in the United States I paid in US Dollars - $24.95 a month for that hosting account.

(All costs are listed as US Dollars in this report. To get the current exchange rate for any figures visit XE.com)

Around a year later the traffic to my web sites had grown quite considerably, so I upgraded to what they call a "High Volume" account. This put me back around $80 a month.

Then six months later, my business had grown again and I needed extra functionality so I moved all my sites to what can be called the pinnacle of web hosting:

A Dedicated Server

What that means is all my web sites were on a dedicated computer. There's no other people sharing it. This gave me a lot more capacity for visitors and allowed me to offer more powerful features on the server.

BUT - to give you a further example (I'm making an educated guess here) - the BBC website probably has several dozen servers at least all sharing the visitors.

They need so many servers to "balance the load" of millions of visitors every single day.

One dedicated computer acting as a server just wouldn't be able to handle that amount of traffic since it would become overloaded.

But I'm not the BBC, so one server does me fine.

Mine was a low end server (quite an old computer model) but it did the job perfectly well. It is what Pair calls a "QS-0" which stands for "QuickServe 0". The lowest of their dedicated server offerings.

For that I paid around $150 a month.

AND (this is a very important point which I'll go into more detail later) it was fully managed.

That means that I get all the power of a dedicated server without having to be a technical expert, since that's all managed for me. All I need to worry about is keeping my web sites up to date for the people visiting.

So in this case, even though my "home site" has always been AllportPublishing.com the land it sits on has become more and more up market, to cope with my online business growing.

And as mentioned I started it all with the $24.95 web hosting service. That said, you can start at an even lower rate of around $7 a month with Pair if you so choose. That's a great way to initially get started with web hosting.

Okay, so let's start going through what web hosting companies offer, and how each of those choices affect you and your online business ...

Part 1 - An Introduction

Part 2 - What Exactly Is a Web Server?

Part 3 - Your Web Server Memory and Operating System Options

Part 4 - Bandwidth, and Backups

Part 5 - More About Backups, And How To Monitor Your Sites Automatically

Part 6 - Databases, Unmanaged Hosting, and More...