We explained one half of the ‘dot com’ process in our last post, that being domain names and how to get your own. Today we’ll tell you about hosting, the second half of the process.

What is hosting?
Every site you visit on the Internet, from Facebook to this one, is fed to you by a computer called a server, somewhere in the world. In our last post we discussed domain names, the things that identify a site. When you type ‘facebook.com’ into your browser, you’re telling it to find the various files related to the Facebook domain, somewhere on a computer or on many computers (servers) wherever that may be. You don’t have to know how this is done, simply that the domain relates to a group of files that actually make up a website. Those files are hosted by Facebook themselves, in some cases, or by gigantic hosting companies such as Amazon. Our site is hosted by a much smaller company than Amazon. There are dozens of hosting companies in every country all over the world.

GoDaddy, as we mentioned in our last post, is a domain registrar that also hosts sites. We suggested that you keep your domains with one company, ours are with GoDaddy, and use another company to host your site. By doing this you are not putting all of your eggs in one basket. You don’t have to take our advice on this. It’s just a suggestion.

What types of hosting are there? 

Quite a few, actually. If you’re just starting out, we’d suggest looking at shared web hosting. This is what we use on our site, simply because it very cost efficient (read: CHEAP!). Sure, the site is a bit slow sometimes but the yearly costs are very minimal. Shared hosting means that many sites are served out by the same computer. In other words, this site plus who knows how many others sit on one server/computer at our hosting company, sharing that computer’s resources. Because the resources are split between a number of sites, the loading times can be affected, depending on how busy each site is.

An alternative to shared hosting is free web hosting, something we wouldn’t suggest, which is supported by ads. You get the free hosting, the hosting company gets the money from the ads that show up on your pages.

Once your site gets bigger and busier and, hopefully, starts making money, you might look at dedicated hosting. This means that one server is dedicated to your site, no others. While you don’t own the server itself, you are the only customer who uses it. Expect to pay much more for this service.

Lastly, and we’ve seen this work quite well, you can host your own site from your home or office. You’d need certain technical skills to do this but it can be done. There used to be an interesting site out there that was hosted on a very old MacIntosh computer, possibly a Mac Plus. If you are interested in starting a hobby site, one that doesn’t necessarily have to be up 24/7, do-it-yourself hosting just might be the ticket for you.

Here’s what a file hosting server looks like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do I decide what hosting company is best for me? 

Price is probably the thing you want to check first. After that, reliability of the hosting is next. You can either do searches for reliable and cheap hosting yourself or get a Twitter account and search for hosting suggestions there. Do a search to see if any of your candidates have accounts. Once you narrow that down, search through their tweets to see what others are saying about them. Don’t let the fact that you’ve never heard of a company’s name deter you. Unless you’re involved in websites now, most or all of the hosting companies will be strangers anyway.

Here’s a sample ad from our hosting company. We’ve removed the name since we’re 50/50 on whether you should use them or not. Plus, they’re not paying us anything for the plug!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of the hosting companies are similar to this, good prices for the first year, then a sizeable jump to their regular prices in subsequent years. This company is offering shared hosting with unlimited disk space, bandwidth, names hosted, etc. In addition to all of this, they have free tools to help you set up your site. While we haven’t found the free tools that important, you might be able to make use of them.

Tip: Choose wisely, folks. It’s a royal pain to move a site from one host to another, specially if it’s a WordPress based site. If you’re going to jump in and create your online dream, do your prep work beforehand.

Thanks for reading! Tips, comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome. Like us on our Facebook page to get a direct help line: Computers Made Simple on Facebook