Web Hosting

Introduction

What is Web Hosting?

Web Hosting

Web hosting is an online service that makes your website’s content accessible on the internet. When you purchase a hosting plan, you are renting space on a physical server to store all the website’s files and data.

Brief History

When we speak about web hosting, we have to go all the way back to 1990s, which is the early days of the internet. This is when the first websites was created, launched and hosted on personal computers. Then after some time when the internet was growing in popularity and becoming bigger and more useful, the need for more robust and reliable hosting solutions emerged. We are now gonna go even more in detail about the history and major milestones of web hosting.

Some major milestones in the history of web hosting:

1969 - ARPANET was created

This started in the 1960s when government researches wanted to link computers in a network to basically facilitate the exchange of information between them. Under the Cold War the efforts to link multiple computers across USA was big, as fears of a nuclear attack were growing. Because of this, information would be preserved across the network in case those locations in the country were hit. Because of this, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was created.The first computer was linked to the network in august 1969 at the University of California, Los Angeles.

1991 - First website hosted

The first website was launched and was hosted on a server at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland.

1996 – cPanel was released

cPanel is a web hosting control panel software developed by cPanel, LLC. It provides a graphical interface (GUI) and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site to the website owner or the “end user”. This is one of the most used hosting control panels today, if not the biggest. It was created as a control panel now-defunct provider Speed Hosting. cPanel 3 was released in 1999, this included the Web Host Manager (WHM) - which is basically a server management tool. It had two levels, the root WHM was for the administrators, and the non-root WHM allowed resellers to create hosting packages, but also manage them at the same time.

2006 – Amazon launched Amazon Web Services

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses around the USA and the world in the form of web services, which is now known as cloud computing. But why is AWS the biggest and most popular? It became and are the biggest because it offered a fullstack of services, user-friendly management and also a “pay-on-the-go” business modal. You remember I said AWS is the biggest and most popular? Yes thats because Amazon currently, as we speak, holds almost 50% of the cloud services market, making it way bigger than its competitors.

2008 - GitHub Pages is launched.

Github created Github Pages in 2008, it’s a static web hosting service for project documentation, blogs and books etc. Github pages content is stored in a Git repository in two kinds of way, you can do it as files served to visitors verbatim, and the other way is in a markdown format. Github works trough Jekyll static website an blog generator. Basically each time the content source is updated, Jekyll regenerates the website and automatically serves it via Github Pages tool. Github have both free and and paid tiers of service, which makes it very popular for school and work related stuff. Github pages supports HTTPS encryption and one one more thing to notice is that websites generated through this service are either hosted as subdomains of the Github.io domain or it can be connected to custom domains which is bought through a third-party domain name registrar.

2014 – The number of websites with unique host-names passed one billion

One billion is a big number, but the fun fact is that this number almost doubled by 2017, which is two billion!

Here are some few info that show where we stand today:

• There are more than 330 000 web hosting providers worldwide.

• The hosting industry, which is big, most of this is owned by just two entities - GoDaddy and EIG.

• Size of shared hosting market is approximately USD 22 billion. But the cloud hosting services are estimated ar around USD 156 billion.

• More than 50%, which is half, of the hosting services use either Apache or Nginx as a web server.

• The hosting market in many countries around the world is dominated by domestic companies.

• The number of registered domain names which is registered in total around the world is more than 350 million.

Popular Web Hosting Services

Bluehost

Bluehost - Extremely fast and reliable hosting with plenty of advanced security add-ons.

HostGator

HostGator - Easy and affordable web hosting with intuitive site building tools

Hostinger

Hostinger - Scalable hosting solutions for fast websites

GoDaddy

GoDaddy - Complete hosting solutions for any website

Network Solutions

Network Solutions - Cloud-based web hosting with easy-to-upgrade packages

Web.com

Web.com - Everything you need to build and host your website

DreamHost

DreamHost - Flexible hosting solutions to ensure your success

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting - High-powered web hosting with plans to suit your unique needs

Features

Disk Space

Disk space is basically the total amount of data that a hard disk/hard drive can store. Disk capacity is displayed usually in three different ways:

• MB (megabytes)

• GB (gigabytes)

• TB (terabytes)

For the most part, 1GB will often be sufficient. For most websites with text and images, 3-5 GB should be plenty. If you except users to download large multimedia files or if more than 500 visitors are expected per day, then you should consider a package with more transfer bandwidth.

Bandwidth

With Bandwidth feature, you can load your website faster, because loading time can take tme and is the time it takes to transfer different website files.

Commonly, network bandwidth is measured in bits per second (bps). And organizations and internet service providers (ISPs) usually measure bandwidth in megabits per second (Mbps) or gigabits per second (Gbps).

Security

Security is something everyone should have, these days no one is safe. According to Fundera, 43% of small businesses are victims of cyber attacks. If you have the right web host, then you could prevent being attacked from cyber attacks.

Some web hosting plan you should consider are:

• SSL certificates

• Automated malware scans

• Firewall management

And if you are working with Bluehost’s Managed WordPress hosting plan, then you could sign up to this, and it will give you additional security features such as:

• Secure shell (SSH) access

• Multi-factor authentication

• Domain privacy

Uptime

Uptime is a measurement of the percentage of time your website is up and available to the users who visit your site compared with the time that the site is offline. In other words, the closer to 100% uptime, the better. If you use the best web hosting, it can provide high uptimes by offering backup servers in multiple locations. Many web hosts have uptime guarantees, one example is Bluehost, which offers 99.9% uptime.

Website Speed

Website speed is the measurement of how quickly your website loads on a user’s browser. Not only does website speed affect user experience, but it also affects search engine optimization (SEO). With good web hosting companies, you can use:

• Using servers with solid-state drives (SSD)

• Limiting sites on a shared server

• Offering a content delivery network (CDN) service

By taking advantage of the tools above, it is possible to increase the speed of a web page.

Website speed does affect UX because a fast page improves user experience, with a slow page it will make people who visit your site angry and frustrated, and with this it will just make them leave your site.

It also affect SEO because it is one of the key determining factors for Google’s algorithm. Like we said slow site will turn visitors away and fast sites provide good user experiences for your visitors. With this Google will rank the fast sites higher than the slow ones.

Pre-installed apps

Here web hosts offer different web hosting features, but in a app, some of these apps include:

• cPanel

• One-Click Installer

• File Transfer Protocol

• E-Commerce Features

Domain Names

Your domain name is the digital address of your digital space on the internet. The reason behind making this was to find and identify internet entities, but without using IP addresses. A domain name is basically an Internet resource name that is universally understood by Web servers and online organizations and provides all pertinent destination information. This makes everything more safe and organized.

For example, Google maintains the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as the primary and secondary DNS addresses for Google Public DNS.

Website Builder

Website builder is a tool or program that can help you create a website without manual code editing. There are two types of website builders:

• Offline Website Builders

• Online Website Builders

The PROS of using website builders:

• No Coding Skills Required

• Cheap and Fast

• Easy to Export

• No Design Skills Required

The CONS of using Website Builders:

• Not Very Suitable for Professional Business

• Not Custom Designed

• Slow Loading Time

• Poor SEO

• Limited Pages

• Limited Features

• Poor Customer Service

• Flash Based

Support

No website is one hundred per cent error-free; there will always be issues or errors down the road which you will have to figure out how to fix. In those cases, a technical support team is something you will need. The biggest and best web hosting providers provide 24/7 customer support in many different ways, such as:

• Knowledge bases

• Forums

• Live chat

• Chatbots

• Email support

• Calls

Backups

Backups are very important, especially if your site handles sensitive information such as e-commerce orders. They can prevent data loss in the event of an incident. It does not matter how good your website is, a website can always get hit by something which will take the website down. A good web hosting company should restore your website with minimal downtime and make frequent automatic backups to protect your website.

Strengths

Shared Hosting

• Low cost: one of the strengths with web hosting is low cost, , thats one of the main advantages.

• Easy to use: it’s easy to use web hosting where it is simple to install and maintain the site trough a system where you just “click and drag” when facilitating the process.

• Technical Support: the good thing is that technical support is guaranteed by most of the companies that offer web hosting, so it’s not scary or risky to do it if you are not sure. Here the user will get help with important factors, such as the website itself, the server and configuration requirements.

• Resources: another advantage is resources, here, you can get a collection of resources that can grow and get bigger while following the websites demands.

VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server)

• Shared hosting is best for personal sites and startups. But VPS hosting wins for dynamic, larger sites and small businesses. VPS is more expensive than shared hosting, and the reason for that is that you get more flexibility over your resource limits, greater security, and improved performance.

• Its cost-effective, saving you money.

Dedicated Server Hosting

• The biggest strength is that it`s very safe, zero risk of being harmed by other companies.

• And you can have total autonomy over the hosting environment, which is very good, because then you have total authority over everything.

Weaknesses

Shared Hosting

• One of the weakness of shared hosting is when the site increase in traffic volume due to resource contention, with this we are talking about other clients of the company which also offers that service of help.

• Another weakness with shared hosting is the inability to customize the hosting service.

• The site is not quite safe from getting the server to be overwhelmed sometimes, and with this the site can actually be taking down.

• And the last but not least weakness, is sites that have high security requirements, for example e-commerce store that have credit cards in it`s own base, because of this the system is not indicated.

VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server)

• A weakness of VPS is that the customer have a lot of work and responsibility, the customer is responsible for all installation, maintenance and also security of VPS, so it`s a lot of work here.

• Another weakness is if the customer have no experience, if the customer have no experience in the subject, then one can hire the management by the supplier, but this is costly.

Dedicated Server Hosting

• Here the weakness is very clear, if you have a small business, then you have a high cost, it`s that simple.

• Another weakness, or disadvantage, if you wanna call it that, it requires some skill to manage and maintain a server, and this cost time to learn if you don’t want to get people to do it for you.

Comparison

Web hosting can be compared to other products in the same category, such as cloud hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting, but these I have already mentioned in the strengths and weaknesses sections above. But what else products can we compare to web hosting? Well this is what we gonna find out now.

Some other products that we can compare to shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting are:

• Cloud hosting

• Managed WordPress Hosting

• Colocation Hosting

Now lets get more deeper into these three new web hosting products which can be compared to the other mentioned above.

Cloud Hosting

With cloud hosting, you don`t share the resources, instead you get the resources to your sites that are 100% dedicated and created only for your site. With this you dont have to worry about other people and websites influence your website.

There are many companies who are cloud host providers, some of these are:

• Google Cloud Platform

• AWS (Amazon Web Services)

• Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean

With cloud hosting, its very simple, we can break down cloud hosting in just two categories:

• Managed

Here the hosting provider will configure and maintain your server.

• Unmanaged

Here you yourself will have to do all the work and configure and maintain your server.

The managed hosting will cost more than the unmanaged, because with the managed option they will do more work for you.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting is not like all the other hosting types, with managed WordPress hosting can not host all kinds of different sites, it can only host WordPress sites. But the good thing is that with managed WordPress hosting, you can use shared hosting and cloud hosting etc.

The most different style of this kind of hosting that we can compare to the other “normal” web hosts is that WordPress have many different types of service specifically created only for managed WordPress hosting, these are:

• You can have daily backups which is automatic. And if you want, you can manually back up your site.

• WordPress staging sites.

• Another good service is that WordPress can automatic update your changes - Automatic WordPress updates.

• If you want to caching in your page or do a content delivery network (CDN), then you can get this with the “WordPress-specific performance optimizations”.

• You can get some good security rules with Wordpress.

• You can get good expert support from Wordpress - Expert WordPress support.

With managed WordPress hosting you can get both good or bad side. The good side is that managed WordPress hosting is convenience. The user will get more stuff than just web hosting. But the bad side is the price, which can be very important for many people. Managed WordPress hosting will always be expensive, but why? Because like we said the user will get a lot of services which is mentioned above, and with getting more, you have to pay more. So if you are a person who are willing to pay more, then managed WordPress hosting is the right web hosting for you.

Colocation Hosting

Colocation hosting is a host type that is not used by small companies, but only the big companies compared to the other hosting types which is used by both small and big companies. Basically whats happening here is that you own the hosting hardware. So you purchase and own the hosting servers, but you also rent space in another company`s data center, this is because you want them to maintain your hardware while you having company data. But again, this is a type of hosting which only the big companies.

Summary

Web hosting is an online service that helps you and allows you to publish your website files onto the internet. This means anyone in the world who has access to internet, has also access to your website. With other words, this is a service you can get from a web hosting provider. Web hosting have been around for a long time and has a long history with many different historical events, from the 90s til now. Web hosting has many different web hosting services sites, Bluehost, Gostator and goDdaddy is one of the biggest ones. It has many helpful features which helps you make get the best web hosting experience. However, like we mentioned before, web hosting has strengths and weaknesses, the strengths and benefits of web hosting is that it gives you technical support and web security. And its also easy to use, low cost and its resources will be a benefit for you. And the weaknesses of web hosting can be some limited stuff, such as limited control, limited resources, risks which come with the security and the dependency the user have on the hosting provider, because its the hosting provider which does the work for the owner of the website, so therefore the owner has to wait for the provider to do the job for him. So as a conclusion, with web hosting, you can put your website on the internet, and this help you can get with hosting providers which does the work for you, there is many hosting providers out there, there is nearly 2 billion websites on the internet, so its not a secret that there will be more and more website out there in the future.

Credits

Author

Kardo Kiyani (kardokiyani)

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