Web Hosting: What and Why?

Over the past few weeks, we have been learning how to start programming a website by building it from the ground up. However, I’m sure at some you have started to ask yourself, “So I’ve coded a basic website, now what?”(just as I thought). Sure it feels awesome to code and work on very own website, but it doesn’t do much good if the only people that can see it in the web browser are ourselves. We need a way to get the cool website we just designed and great content we have out to people surfing the Internet. Enter web hosting–

Web hosting is how we can take the .html file that we have programmed on our laptop, in our comfy recliner and slippers, and get it out there for the world to see. Web hosting is actually a rather simple concept to understand: A hosting company sets up certain designated computers in a facility, usually in a datacenter.



These computers are called web servers. The only purpose that a web server has is storing the files of a website until a person visits that website, at which point the server retrieves the information as quickly as possible to be displayed in the visitors web browser.

Ideally, a server should be able to respond to hundreds of requests at a time, however responding to at least a few dozens at any given moment is pretty much a necessity. While you could “technically” host a website from your own computer, most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) would not allow you to run a web-related server on their networks. 

And even if you could, or find a way around that, to host on a consumer connection wouldn’t do very much good. At most a few people might be able to access our website before the limited megabyte upload/download speed and bandwidth would have our site coming to a fast crash. All this is has been without even mentioning the very high costs it would take to get a connection able to do only slightly more than this.

Therefore, we will leave it up to the professional web hosting companies to do this for us at a much lower cost to our precious pocketbooks. This really leaves us with one question to ask; Who do I chose to do my web hosting? While there is no real shortage of companies out there who would love to take our business (and our money!), I would suggest sticking with the few big and reputable ones, at least for now while we are starting out. The ones I would go with are:

            iPage

            BlueHost

            Host Gator