Web Hosting Basics
What is web hosting?
In order to display a website over the internet, you need a web server. A web server stores your website, so when your domain name is entered into a browser, it will connect with the server housing your site data, and deliver the information back over the internet to the end-user. The company providing the servers that store your website data is called a web hosting company. Depending upon your site needs, these providers have many different types of hosting methods available.
What is shared web hosting?
Shared hosting is often compared to apartment living. Renting an apartment is very affordable, since the residents residing in the complex share all building expenses. Like apartment living, these websites hosted on shared servers often have very little storage space. In comparison to apartment living shared hosting is not usually a permanent solution, but it is a great and inexpensive starting point.
What is a dedicated server?
If a shared server would be comparable to an apartment building, a dedicated server would equate to a single home. Your business growing is equivalent to a family expanding and needing space to grow. Since expenses are no longer shared and no one else resides in your family’s home, your price as a homeowner increases. A homeowner can paint and decorate their house in a style that suits them; the resident of a dedicated server has full access to setup the server to meet their own personal needs.
What is colocation?
If you go into Tornado Alley, you want to seek a safe haven during a serious storm. This shelter will provide security and other resources to ensure your safety. Like a storm shelter, a datacenter provides physical security and other resources for your server. Colocation takes the stress away from worrying about an on-premise server. Colocation provides business continuity, scalability, space, power, cooling and physical security.
What is cloud hosting?
Cloud computing allows you to access and store data and programs over the internet versus your computer’s hard-drive. This allows you to access a program or your data at anytime, anywhere and on any device. Cloud hosting ties multiple physical machines together to work as one and handle high traffic loads or spikes. If one machine unexpectedly fails your data will reroute to another machine, so your website will never go down. Another common misconception is that the cloud is not secure; Netsonic’s personal cloud infrastructure completely isolates your data from others, making it more of a scalable dedicated server.
