Webhosting

Webhosting is the process in which you host your website and other related services with a third party web hosting provider on one of their servers that are located within data centres. Webhosting allows you to host your website in a public environment so that it is accessible from the internet, which is something that can’t be achieved unless you have your own servers in a data centre. Webhosting can come in different forms, since there are many different services required for webhosting. You can normally get service specific webhosting, such as email hosting and DNS hosting; you can also get complete web hosting packages that allow you hosting for a domain, meaning that you can host the website that you have created as well as the related email accounts and DNS.

In most cases, web hosts will host their high specification servers in a data centre, the main reason being for security purposes, but also because data centres offer web hosts an advantage with regards to the technology needed for webhosting. With every web hosting account, you will find that you are assigned a certain amount of bandwidth; this amount that is assigned is the amount of data that you are allowed to transfer between your website and visitor’s computers. Many different bandwidth providers are hosted in data centres as well as web hosts, meaning that web hosts can take advantage of these connection providers to get the bandwidth and connection pipes that they need to supply their servers with. The more connections, or ‘peers’ that a web host utilizes usually means that websites hosted by that web hosting provider will load fast from many parts of the world.

For a web hosting provider to be able to provide a web hosting service, it must have its own dedicated servers that can take the strain of hosting multiple websites, along with the software that is required to run them effectively. These days web hosting providers are using dual or quad core servers, since these are now seen as the most reliable as oppose to a single web hosting server. Most web hosting providers are able to fit well over 100 accounts on a server without affecting its performance, although this number is much lower at about 10-15 for VPS hosting, although that is dependent on the specifications of the VPS hosting node.

At the heart of any server is an operating system responsible for handling the requests of the programs that are installed on the server. Although there are several different operating systems available for use, the two most popular in the web hosting industry are Linux and Windows. Linux web hosting packages are provided by more or less every web hosting provider since Linux is a free operating system, meaning that no licensing fees are involved; Windows however is a costly operating system, requiring the payment of license fees before use, this means that smaller webhosting providers are unable to provide Windows based webhosting services.

On top of an operating system, a webhosting server will in most cases have a control panel installed on it to allow customers to manage their webhosting accounts with ease. Control panels are able to provide webhosting providers with complete ease of management both customer and server wise, with the advantage of allowing clients access via the internet to manage more or less any aspect of their webhosting account. Control panels are normally available with all types of webhosting, and in some cases are optional of VPS and dedicated server hosting. There are many different control panels around for the webhosting market, these include:

• Plesk - this control panel is produced for both Windows and Linux web hosting, meaning that you can host on both platforms and use one control panel                                             
• cPanel - this control panel is currently produced for Linux web hosting only, and is regarded as one of the most popular control panels for Linux based web hosting                  
• Webmin - although designed more towards VPS and dedicated server hosting, Webmin is still a popular control panel and allows for easy server management  
• LXAdmin - this is a control panel produced by the maker of the HyperVM VPS hosting manager, and is designed for low specification VPS servers because of its low memory footprint                

To be continued…