What Is Website Hosting?
This is a short post explaining exactly what website hosting is. We are not going to go into incredible detail because how websites are delivered to your browser is complex using DNS nodes and boring, geeky stuff but hopefully, we can use some analogies so you can understand what website hosting is.
What is it in laymen's terms?
Website hosting is just really a computer/server where your website files are stored so they can be accessed from the world wide web, this includes all your HTML files, images, scripts etc, a little bit like this screenshot below, you can see we have three websites here all nicely isolated from each other so when you do something on one website it doesn't affect any other websites.
How many websites or folders sit on these servers?
Depending on the website host, there can be thousands, if you have your own dedicated hosting you may just have your own websites on there, this is great because all the computer resources are used for your websites only, meaning that your website can be geared up for speed.
I only have a small website, do I need hosting?
Yes, all websites that are served up to the internet needs some kind of website hosting.
How much should I pay for website hosting?
This depends on what you are storing and how your website works. You can expect to pay as little as £50 a year up to £5,000 per month. Again, it is all depending on the type of hosting you require, it may just be Wordpress hosting so expect to pay very little.
Are there different types of hosting?
Yes, there are many things to consider, firstly, depending on what language your website is developed in (e.g. PHP, ASP.NET) will play a role in what type of hosting you will need. As well as this, the geographical location will play an important role, if your customers are based in the UK, there is no real reason why your website should be hosted anywhere other than the UK. You have to appreciate that even though data is small, it still needs to be transmitted around the world.
Is website hosting secure?
There has been a lot of speculation about the security of hosting, our advice is to make sure you regularly update FTP passwords and get advice from a reputable web design agency like Pebble about firewalls and preventing unauthorised access to your website. More often than not, it is actually the website that provides the vulnerability rather than the hosting space itself.
We hope this short post has given you a bit of an insight into website hosting, Pebble provides website hosting for all out clients, for more information about website hosting call us on 01733 902070 or email us via our contact form.