Web hosting is one of the terms we hear often, but not all of us knows well what it does. Knowing how a web hosting works can lead us to choosing the best web hosting service which is effective and resource efficient.
For a start, imagine a web hosting as a virtual real estate with web hosting service companies as the real estate agents. These virtual real estate agents only rent their virtual estates, they don’t sell. They will charge you a certain amount of money for a certain period to use the virtual estate.
What can you do with the virtual estate (read: your hosting account)? Well, of course, you can build your virtual store (your website, online store, blog, etc). But first, you need to have an address for people to find you. It’s your domain name. Domain names commonly look either like: www.thisismystore.com, www.thatsyourstore.net or even easi.ly.
Now, acquiring the spot and the address of your online business aren’t the only thing you need to think about. Before deciding which spot you’d like to put your online store on, you’ll want to consider if your virtual space also has or support these general and security features. Do they have:
- a firewall protection to prevent incoming attacks against your and everyone else’s store hosted in the web hosting company
- a lot of empty spaces to store more of your products
- an email feature. This is like if the real estate allows you to compose, accept and reply to mails
- a reliable customer service support to make sure you will get assistance 24/7
- a speedy server, wide broadband and plenty of bandwidth. These all represent how fast and comfortable people will browse your store
- etc
Web hosting services also come in two operating platforms. One is Windows and the other is Linux. Linux based hosting is specifically designed to handle web server applications while Windows platform is designed to work on a Windows machine. If you can’t tell the difference, you won’t need it now.
If you’re short on budget, there always the free web hosting services. But, it’s not that you don’t pay anything. If you’re going to do business with it, you better get a paid one since the free web hosting services has very limited features and usually they don’t allow you to freely choose your own domain name. For example, WordPress.com provides a free blogging account where you don’t need to pay a single penny. But your domain name will be mystore.wordpress.com. Not very cool, huh? But if you’re still learning, it’s nice to give it a go.
Okay, so what now?
since there are hundreds if not tens of web hosting providers out there, why don’t you check out webhostinggeeks.com to get suggestions of which web hosting service might suite your need?
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