About Web Hosting:
Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page on the Internet. A web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet.
There are different types of web hosting services available to host your website. Before signing up for web hosting services, it is important to know what kind of service your website needs, the kind of server your business needs, your budget, and what type of services the web host offers.
Hosting Options:
- Free Hosting: Free web hosting can be a good choice when you just want to build a non-critical website. In a free hosting environment connection speed is slow, website can be down frequently, and advertising banners is automatically added to your website.
- Shared Hosting: In a shared hosting environment, your and other website owners shared one server. Shared hosting services are reasonable because the cost to operate the server is shared between you and these other owners.
- Dedicated Hosting: In a dedicated hosting environment, you have the entire web server to yourself. This allows for faster performance, as you have all the server’s resources entirely, without sharing with other website owners. This is a good choice for websites that requires a lot of system resources, or need a higher level of security.
- Collocated Hosting: In this type of hosting, you will purchase your own server and have it housed at a web host’s facilities. You will be in charge of the server itself. The advantage of this type of hosting service is that you will have full control of the web server. You can install any scripts or applications you need.
Hosting Selection:
Before choosing your web host, you’ll need to think about your requirements.
- Disc Space: Disc space represents the amount of hard disc space reserved by the web host for your exclusive usage. Nowadays hard disk space is quite cheap and knowing that an average website hardly ever needs more space, most web hosts offer space like 300-500MB or more than that per month in most of their packages.
- Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer that takes place while accessing your website. It is used all the time, either in viewing web pages or in downloading images, video clips or any other files. Your monthly bandwidth increases with the growth of your website. More traffic translates into consumption of more bytes being transferred.
- Reliability, Speed & Security: Reliability, access speed and web security are key points that any good web host must ensure. Not just the growth but the very existence of your website depends upon these three factors.
- Customer Service & Technical Support: Check out whether your web host provides 24/7 service support or not without missing on Sundays or Public Holidays? Not that you need support all the time but you should get help when you want it. It is awfully important that your web host should provide you technical support along with their customer service.
- Other Services:
- PHP/MySQL support, offering PHP 5 and MySQL 5 database
- Unrestricted FTP access with multiple FTP accounts
- Multiple subdomains and parked/add-on domains
- Multiple POP3 and IMAP email accounts with web-mail support
- Web site virus & spam protection, CGI, Perl, SSL support
- At least 99.9% network uptime guarantee.
Below are Top 5 Web Hosting Service Providers.