Web Hosting Basics

Choosing the right web host is a critical part of web development for any business or online enterprise. Web hosting is the serving of a website or other online presence from a dedicated web server. In most cases, except when establishing your own server, this requires the use of a dedicated web host that manages their own servers or rents servers in a data centre. Choosing the right host is essential because it ensures the proper and stable running of your website. Web hosting service levels vary greatly with basic accounts being shared hosting accounts. Basic in name only, a shared hosting account provides you with a shared portion of a web server and while many websites are often shared on the same server the advances in server technology make this an even more viable option and for the majority of websites a shared hosting account should be ample. Other, more dedicated options, do exist. A Virtual Private Server is a server that has been securely partitioned and each hosted account runs as though it had an entire dedicated server. This secure method of web hosting is more expensive than a shared account but typically allows much greater freedom, more storage space, and allows each account to manage multiple domains and websites. A dedicated server can be bought or, more commonly, rented from a host or datacentre. This allows you the use of an entire server and gives you complete freedom over what you do with that server, including which software to install and the number and type of domains and websites that are stored on it. This is the most expensive web hosting option and is only usually necessary for the largest or most data sensitive of websites.