What is web hosting in simple language?
It is a way of renting space on another computer. This other computer is connected to the internet 24.7, 365 days a year. It's called a server. It is simply a fast computer with a lot of storage space, or Gigabyte (or Terabyte nowadays). After you rent your own space on the serve, you can use your home computer to log on to it and build a website. Then the whole world can visit your space on that server and via the internet simply by typing the name of your website in their browser. So you see, it's just like real estate. You rent some land (computer space) and build a house (website) with an address (domain name).
The amount of storage space you rent is measured in gigabytes, and the number of people that can view your website (and other files like videos and photos and music) is a measure of the bandwidth allotted to your site. The more bandwidth you have, the more visitors you can entertain at any one time. The bandwidth is like a highway to your site. The bigger the highway, the more cars can come. If you gain such a large number of visitors that you exceed your allotted bandwidth (like creating a traffic jam), your site could be shut down temporarily. Nowadays with storage media being so cheap, the top 10 web hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth even on their basic personal hosting plans. So always look for a company that offers unlimited storage space and bandwidth.
Another good thing to look for when searching for a good hosting company, is uptime. This is the amount of time the server will be up and running, measured as a percentage. For example, many hosts will usually offer 99.9% uptime. That means the server could be down for maintenance maybe about 8 hours every year. The top 10 companies usually offer 99.99% uptime (less than 1 hour of downtime every year).
Another thing you may want to do is keep track of your site statistics. You'll find that all hosts ( at least the major ones) offer some kind of stats tracking tool for free. You can use it to monitor the number of visitors on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis, even hourly if you so choose. You can also find out how many of those are unique visitors, how many just come once and how many are repeat visitors etc, as well as all sorts of interesting things like which browser they use and which website they came from before they got to yours. You can view graphs to see the trends also.
Do you want to add blogging to your site? Most hosts offer free blogging software like WordPress and Joomla.
And last but not least (perhaps the most important thing) is to look closely at reviews about customer support. Go only with companies that offer 24/7 phone support and some kind of email support, as well as live chat. Then hopefully you will have a happy web hosting experience.
John Guinn is the Founder and CEO of Complete Hosting Reviews, a website that publishes unbiased reviews of the top web hosting companies.
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