What is Website Hosting?
What Do You Mean Website Hosting?
Everyone wants to be on the internet, the opportunities in the internet are limitless. However, when you say you want to be on the internet, what exactly is entailed in being on the internet. Having a presence on the internet requires only a few things, a domain registration, a website hosting and an .ftp upload program. Now if your mind just fogged over and you decided to stop ready, WAIT!. Keep going, we are going to explain this is pretty simple terms for those of you who aren’t internet savvy, yet. So clear your brain for a few minutes and hang in there. The internet is a huge highway and parking lot sale and a website is the parking lot where you have items displayed.
What is Domain Name Registration?
Domain registration is fairly easy to understand, its your name, or your parking lot on the internet. Once you find a catchy name, not already taken, you will register that name and that registration usually comes along with a website hosting product. It is you .com, though other choices are now available such as .biz, .net, .org, .tv, etc. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? You can check to see if your domain is still available by using the WHOIS.
Website Hosting and Small Business Web Hosting
I list these two headings together because they are related. Website hosting is a service that is offered by ISP (internet service provider) for a fee. The fee is generally associated with a package of services that you can buy from the ISP. One of those services is a small business web hosting which provides a package of the services that most small businesses will need to get a website up and running. Otherwise, website hosting packages come with email, storage space and bandwidth choices. Once again I heard your brain fog over.
E-mail is the number of mailboxes you need, storage space is the amount of space your website will take up and bandwidth is how much transfer of bits is involved in your website. To go back to our parking lot analogy, your storage space is the size of your parking lot, the e-mail is how many mail slots your need and your bandwidth is the traffic in your parking lot. Figure out your parking lot size by figuring out how many bytes all your website pages and pictures.
Bandwidth is how much data is transferred each time someone visits your site. If you website is 1 MB (1000 bytes) and you have 5 visitors a day you use 5000 bytes. However, remember if you have multiple pages, figure that each visitor will click on each page at least once. So when you look at your website hosting, look for the amount of these three items needed.
FTP Program
You have almost survived your website hosting decisions, you just need to determine how you are going to get your website up to the ISP server. To do this you will need a ftp (file transfer protocol) program. Many website hosting services have a built-in ftp services called file manager and many choices of programs are available. You can also find free ftp programs online. To go back to our parking lot analogy, this is the forklift you use to put your products out for public view. This program will transfer the files that you have created on your computer, to the computer space you have purchased on your website hosting service’s server.
Website hosting is not a small decision and while we have tried to provide you a humorous look at the decision, choose your website hosting carefully. Because a good domain name registration and reliable web hosting are the two main pillars on which you are going to build your online business.