It is first of all important that you understand how to go about choosing the best web hosting provider; though, at the same time it will also prove to be quite difficult to pinpoint the proper provider. Before proceeding further with your selection you need to have already made a list detailing what your requirements with respect to web hosting are.

Previous Performance

There are a few things worth bearing in mind when it comes to choosing your web hosting provider. To start with, you will need to study their past performance and knows details such as the length of time that they have been in business, the amount of up-time that they commit to, awards that they have won and whether they are hosting well known sites.

Another very important point with regard to choosing the right web hosting provider is that the provider must be able to commit to providing maximum uptime. Many times, the web hosting provider’s server may experience technical faults or their servers may crash which will mean that your website too will become non-functional. You need to be assured that your web hosting provider provides you with at least ninety-eight percent uptime, though today, many providers are guaranteeing as much as 99.8 percent uptime.

You also need to check how flexible is the web hosting provider’s web hosting plan and the more flexible the plan is the better will be the options to choose from. You should be able to start with a basic plan and then upgrade as and when it becomes necessary. It is also better to avoid web hosting providers that only offer a single plan since such plans may not always suit your needs.

Cost as well as number of features is another important aspect to choosing your web hosting provider. If the provider offers you features that are in accordance with your needs and the costs too are affordable you will then not have much problem in getting your website hosted from such a provider.

You will also need to keep in mind a few other things before being able to decide on a particular web hosting provider. You need to evaluate type of payment plans, customer support, as well as backup before choosing a particular web hosting provider. In case your budget is limited, you will then need to expand your search further to look instead for any inexpensive web hosting plans on offer.

The bottom line when it concerns being able to pick the right web hosting provider is that you need to find a match between your needs and the plans being offered by the provider.

Shared web hosting is the phrase used for a service provided by a web hosting provider in which the server is shared by several webpages, though they are sectioned off from each other for security. There are additional items they share which will not be considered here. Dedicated web hosting provides an entire server for a single webpage. Dedicated web hosting is expensive, and is the only type of service that was first provided when the internet became common.

The advent of shared web hosting made the internet financial feasible for a much larger group of people, companies and institutions. The sharing of resources that created shared web hosting caused a huge influx into the internet. While many large corporation maintain dedicated web server, the largest number of webpages are on shared web hosting.

Shared Web Hosting Can Have Some Difficulties

Shared web hosting does have some difficulties. When you choose a web hosting provider, and they offer shared web hosting you need to be sure that they provide certain services to make sure and avoid the difficulties. The web hosting provider needs to manager the server. That means monitoring, security, up-time and maintenance. The shared web server is not located where you are sitting at your computer, therefore, you cannot physically provide maintenance for the shared web server. You need to be sure that your web hosting provider is providing maintenance. As part of the maintenance, they should also provide monitoring of the server.

Monitoring of the server is imperative on shared web hosting. As you cannot look over at the server and verify that is it up and working, as you would do if you had dedicated web hosting on your own computer, you are dependent on the web hosting provider to monitor and make sure that the server is up and running mostly 24/7. All computers require maintenance and so minor downtown is to be expected.

The maintenance and maintenance go to the up-time issue. The internet is a 24/7 proposition and while you are sleeping, someone on the other side of the world may be trying to buy your product. You don’t want down-time, because you want that person to be able to buy your product while you sleep.

The last difficulty that needs to be handled by the web hosting provider in the shared web hosting is security. Security so that the different webpages to do have access to each other, and security from outside. To secure the websites from hackers and other attacks that will cause the servers to go down and the webpages to be inaccessible, the web hosting provider needs to have firewalls and other security protocols in place.

Internet hosting is, at its simplest level, a service provided to the public that allows you to have an internet webpage. The internet or information super highway is a name or nickname for millions of computers that are connected and from which you can access data. The computer that is part of the make up the internet is called a server. Servers can be as simple as the computer you have on your desk top, or the complex racks of computers that fill rooms. Most people do not host their own webpages on their desktop computer; they purchase the service from an Internet Service provider (ISP).

An ISP is a company that has a connection to the Internet, and they provide and sell that connection to the public. Most often you will here from the ISP that they have T1 access or multiple T1 access. This is a digital stream through which data is transferred. Internet hosting sells you time on this digital stream, which they call bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from your webpage to others. Some ISP provides shared web hosting that is less expensive and allows several users to share the digital stream and space on the server (though each is sectioned off from the others for security).

As the second part of the internet hosting you purchase server storage space. Each server has, just like your home computer, a maximum about of hard drive space. You commonly see in computer ads, that a computer has 200 GB of hard drive space. This means that the hard drive can store 200 gigabytes (200 billion bytes). To be able to conceptualize this a single character on your word processing program, usually, equals 1 byte. The servers that make up the internet are storing data on hard drives that have storage space measure in terabytes or one trillion bytes. You purchase part of the storage space in which to place your webpage. For most webpages shared web hosting is what they choose, as the price of dedicated web hosting is outside their budgets.

The third part of the internet hosting is usually e-mail boxes. This is a designated number of e-mail boxes set aside for your use. You can think of e-mail boxes as either a mail slot or a mailbox. It is the place where you receive, and sometimes, store the messages you receive. Each mailbox is designated by a name such as joeschmoo@schmoolimited.com. This means that Joe Schmoo is the name of the e-mail box and the @schmoolimited.com tells the internet where that mailbox is located.

Now you have the basics of what the phrase internet hosting includes.

When you have decided to have an internet presence, you want that presence to be one people can access. If your customers, clients, employees and browsers cannot get to your website because your web hosting is unreliable, then you have wasted your resources in building and maintaining your website. If you have a retail site, it does you no good if people cannot but from it. You have many choices in internet hosting services, you need to evaluate them for reliability. We are going to explore, of what reliable web hosting consists.

The first aspect of reliable web hosting is up-time. By this we mean the amount of time the webpage is up on the internet and accessible. All servers will have downtime when they do maintenance. Computers require maintenance and the internet is made up of millions of computers. Some server maintenance is expected, but you need to know how much downtime your internet hosting service will have.

Up-time problems are compounded by hacking and hacking attacks, you need to verify your internet hosting has firewall protection from attacks. If they have no protection from attacks you will have too much downtime. While you think your website is not the type to have a hacking attack, remember, your website is not the only website on that server. Check the security of your internet hosting carefully before you decide.

Monitoring of the servers in another up-time issue. To have reliable web hosting, there must be ongoing monitoring of the servers. The internet is a 24/7 proposition, and you want people to be able to access your website 24/7. You want to make sales while you sleep, and the other half of the world is doing business. The worldwide business opportunity is not worldwide if your internet hosting does not monitor it’s servers and they go down at night, with no one to get them back up until morning.

The last area of reliable web hosting we will consider is the backups. You need to be sure that your website server is backed up everyday. If there is an attack or a computer failure, both of which are more common then we want to believe, if there was no daily back-up, then your internet hosting company will have to use the last back-up they made. That may be an old website, as changes are ongoing for any business. If you don’t know that there was a problem you could have difficulty. For example, say you entered a new products into your website, but you discover that you have put on the incorrect price. Those items will sell at that price until you change it. Say you fixed your mistake today, and the server goes down and uses the back-up from three, you are still selling that product at the wrong price, even though you expended the time to fix your mistake, or the product will not be available at all.

Carefully evaluate these areas to be sure you have purchased reliable web hosting, so that you will experience the limitless opportunities of the internet.

Many developers and programmers prefer Linux web hosting over Windows web hosting, for many reasons. However, the choice of Linux web hosting needs to be made at the time you are starting development of your webpage. The reason that you must make the choice, prior to webpage design, is that the choice of languages used in writing the webpage matters when you are choosing web hosting. Linux languages include PHP, MySQL and Perl. If your programmer is unable to use these languages you need to choose less reliable web hosting.

Advantages to Linux Web Hosting

There are many advantages to the choice of Linux web hosting, but we will only be able to cover a few because of the limited space.

The first advantage is that Linux is an open source code product and as such is freely downloadable and shareable. This decreases the need for specific software programs and licensing agreements.

Data control and use in Linux is by relational MySQL databases, which work wonderfully with Linux web hosting and allows for very quick data access. Relational databases are those that have several databases that relate and can all be accessed and data combined. This is exceptionally important for businesses with complex needs.

Linux web hosting is more reliable web hosting without the crashing and difficulties often experienced with Windows web hosting.

Linux web hosting is most often less expensive and the software used by the Linux is much less expensive.

Security of a Linux web hosting is much higher than that of Windows. The ongoing care Linux provides in keeping security as a top priority makes this feature one that will not diminish with time.

Linux web hosting works much better for large websites, with the need for complex data use. Part of this is the ease in relational databases, which move faster and with much less difficulty in Linux web hosting. However, if you have a webpage, Linux web hosting should be a first choice.

If you wish, long-term, to change from Linux web hosting to Windows, the conversion is not overly difficult.

Disadvantages of Linux Web Hosting

There are two main disadvantages to Linux web hosting and we will not ignore them in this review. The Linux web hosting is currently less friendly to the inexperienced web programmer and they cannot accommodate Windows applications.

When choosing to obtain Linux web hosting, you are choosing reliable web hosting, secure web hosting and much less expensive web hosting.