A Guide To Web Hosting And Server Structure

Owning a website is no longer a complicated and overly expensive deal. Apart from the free CMS platforms such as Joomla and WordPress, you can always purchase a .com domain or a shared hosting account for less than $10 – and there you have it! Your website.

Of course, if you want to get your hands on a really good domain and really good hosting services, you may need to pull more than $10 out of your pocket. But when you think that this is an investment that can potentially boost your business profits, it is worth every penny.

Web hosting refers to the place where individuals or organisations store their websites. The thing with websites is that they need to be somewhere in order to be accessible. So think about web hosting as the apartment you are buying for your website to live in.

When you want to host a website you basically want to make it available to the public worldwide. So this apartment where your website lives is a server. The server exists physically somewhere in the world, but it makes your website accessible from anywhere on the globe.

There are different types of apartments that you can purchase for your website, depending on your needs and the size of the website: a shared condo, an individual suite, or its own penthouse.

The answer depends on your own understanding of running a website. In order to put up your website on the Internet and share files such as HTML documents, videos and images, a server with a high-speed Internet connection will be needed.

But you do not need to get your head around the process. For an IT expert, the job is as easy as ABC.

Depending on the type of web hosting you need, you can choose from a variety of packages:

Shared hosting – is a better option for anyone who is looking to find an initial space for launching a personal blog or business brochure website.

VPS hosting – if you have outgrown your shared hosting account this is the best choice you can make, since most websites that have more than 500 hits a day take this option.

Dedicated hosting – this is the ideal choice to make if you are setting up a large and complex e-commerce site or website. Dedicated hosting is the most powerful option to take when you need a secure place to handle the increasing demand. In general, websites that have more than 1000 hits per day choose this option.

As opposed to hosting, a web server represents the computer on which the web pages of your website are stored (hosted).

Did you know: It is estimated that by the middle of 2016, the number of websites in the world will exceed 1 billion, after the first ever website was published on August 6, 1991, by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland.

More so, over 50% of websites, today are hosted on either Apache or nginx, both being open-source web servers. As of February 2015, 39% of servers are being hosted on Apache and 29% on Microsoft. (>Source)

1.Bandwidth

The bandwidth you are using will determine the speed of your website. In other words, if you want a fast-working website, make sure you know how to manage it correctly.

Here are some quick tips to help:

This part is really important for your website’s success. The larger the files, the slower the website will load. And you only have about 3 seconds for the website to load before visitors will leave. This can result in a very high bounce rate and very poor SEO results.

2. Programming services

The website hosting packages allow you to create web pages using programming languages such as HTML, PHP, and ASP as well as databases. Take into account these useful tips:

3. Uptime

The percentage of time that a hosting server stays up or running is referred to as uptime.

Bonus Tip: 99.5% is an average of 3.5 hours of downtime per month, while 99.9% represents an average of 40 minutes of downtime per month.

If you want to learn more about the power of web hosting and server structure, do not hesitate to contact us here. We can provide you with optimised solutions to cater to your every professional need.