Web Hosting Provider
Web Hosting Provider
There are many web hosting providers around at this moment in time, each of them rivaling to provide you with the best web hosting package that is possible. Due to the large growth of the web hosting industry over the past few years, there are now many web hosting providers both large and small providing a large range of web hosting packages from shared accounts to VPS and dedicated servers. There are also web hosting providers available in specialist areas so that you can ensure that your web hosting needs are always met professionally by the right people.
A web hosting provider is typically seen as a company that is able to provide the necessary services to allow customers to host their websites and other important web-related services under one manageable account. Most web hosting providers use special software to allow customers to manage their web hosting accounts with ease, these are known as ‘control panels’. Examples of web hosting control panels include Plesk for Microsoft Windows web hosting and Linux web hosting, as well as cPanel for Linux web hosting only. Web hosting providers re in most cases ‘split’ by the Atlantic Ocean; this is because most potential web hosting customers search for either US or UK based web hosting services.
At the heart of any web hosting server is an operating system, which is in charge of managing and executing all the requests that are received. Most web hosting providers typically offer either Windows based or Linux based web hosting services. At the heart of a Linux web hosting package is a Linux operating system, sometimes better known as a ‘distribution’; the most popular Linux distributions for web hosting include CentOS, which is based on the RHEL distribution and the Ubuntu distribution which has seen steady growth over the past couple of years.
Web hosting providers mainly provide web hosting packages for the sole purpose of allowing customers to host websites that they have developed. If you have developed your website using a server side scripting language along with a database backend, then in most cases you will want to ensure that you choose the right web hosting package for you needs. If you have developed your website using PHP or Perl, with a MySQL database backend, then you should choose a Linux web hosting package from a web hosting provider since this combination will work best in a Linux hosting environment. ASP or ASP.NET web applications with a MSSQL database backend can only be hosted in a Windows web hosting environment since they are Microsoft products; however, PHP and MySQL websites can also be hosted in a Windows hosting environment.
Web hosting providers have a large amount of servers, most of which are of high specification, so that they are able to cope with customer demand for web hosting services. In some cases you will get ‘overselling’ web hosting providers who are selling off more than they are able to provide, meaning that you will end up with an over-populated server with a high load because it is unable to cope with the number of accounts it’s hosting. Web hosts which don’t undersell are able to cope with customer demand, and don’t overload their servers with too many web hosting accounts. An overselling web host can be normally be detected by the specifications of their packages, for example in most cases an overselling web host will be offering packages with both unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
More and more web hosting providers are starting to offer VPS hosting servers, since many people are now realizing their value for money as they are seen as the ‘fill in’ for the large price gap between a standard reseller hosting account and a dedicated server. A VPS server is hosted on a high specification hosting node along with many other VPS servers, all of which share the hosting node’s physical resources.
Dedicated servers, which are now in high demand because of low prices, work in a similar way to VPS servers in terms of the internal environment. With a dedicated server, you are the sole user meaning that you aren’t sharing the resources of the server with anyone else unless you choose to.
There are now many web hosting providers available meaning that you are able to ensure that you find the right web hosting service for you. Most web hosting providers are now able to provide VPS hosting and dedicated hosting alongside the traditional web hosting plans of shared website hosting and reseller website hosting, this along with the rise in the number of web hosting providers means that there is now greater choice within the web hosting market.
