What is web hosting?

Web hosting is a service that stores your website or web application and makes it easily accessible on different devices such as desktop, mobile and tablet. Any web application or website is usually made up of many files, such as images, videos, text and code, that you need to store on special computers called servers. A web hosting service provider maintains, configures and operates physical servers that you can rent for your files. Website and web application hosting services also provide additional support, such as security, website backup, and website performance, which frees up your time.

Why is web hosting important?

Hosting your business website on an internal server can be an internal server and can be time-consuming and expensive. Web hosting providers offer the following benefits:

Performance

A web hosting company that manages hardware resources for multiple websites has more purchasing power. It invests in the latest technology so that you get high-performance web servers with processing power, internal memory, and other computing resources. This improves website performance, and your visitors can load pages faster.

What are the features of web hosting?

Most web hosting companies provide different hosting packages and plans. Your monthly web hosting cost can range from free to paid, depending on the following factors:

The size of your website.

Number of daily website visitors.

High time website or webpage traffic.

Web Hosting Features You Need

Before choosing a web hosting service, explore the different features that different services provide. Following are the main features usually provided.

 Disk space

Your website will need storage space for emails, web files, images and databases. When you're estimating your storage needs, consider future website growth and website traffic.

Bandwidth and data transfer

In the web hosting industry, the terms bandwidth and data transfer are often used interchangeably. However, they are two different things. Bandwidth is the amount of data your website can transmit to visitors at one time. Data transfer is the actual amount of data it transfers.

You can think of bandwidth as a pipe. The larger the pipe, the more water can pass through it. However, for various reasons, you may not use the full capacity of the pipe. Data transfer is similar to the actual amount of water that flows through a pipe in a given period of time.

Email accounts

Many web hosting plans include an email account. You can associate your email address with your website name.

What is the difference between web hosting and domain name?

Web hosting provides your website or web application with a server or machine on the Internet. But a domain name gives your applications an address so your users can find you.

Domain name

On the Internet, each machine has a unique number, called an IP address. Users use this IP address to locate the machine and websites or resources on that machine. IP addresses can be difficult to remember. This is why domain name registries use a Domain Name System (DNS) to map IP addresses to easy-to-remember website names. These registries map website names to the IP addresses of web hosting servers, known as domain names.

How does web hosting work?

When you create an account with your web hosting provider, your provider allocates some space on its server for your website or web application. You can access and manage this space from your hosting account dashboard. You will also have access to other resources, such as random access memory (RAM), central processing unit (CPU), and bandwidth. The percentage of server resources you receive depends on the type of web hosting service you choose.

Choosing a web hosting plan is like renting office space. The least expensive option is to lease a coworking space. As your company grows, you can lease an entire office or even an entire building.

Web hosting service providers relieve the stress of ongoing server maintenance. They perform regular system upgrades to maintain high security standards. By doing so, they free up your IT resources so you can focus on application delivery rather than server management.

Technical support

Most web hosting services offer comprehensive support for solving performance issues. They also streamline website monitoring and analytics, data backup and recovery, and other similar features that make your website run more smoothly.

Safety and Compliance

Web hosting services use an end-to-end approach to securing infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures that meet all compliance requirements.