What is a Web Hosting Company?

What is a Web Hosting Company? A web hosting company uses huge banks of computers called servers to store websites and to serve them to internet users around the world.

The first two things that you tend to do when creating your first website is to decide what it is going to be about and what you are going to call it. The next decision you need to make is where to host it from.

You might think that you will just store your website files on your own computer but although that is technically possible you have to think about how others will then access your website if it’s on your pc in your office. This is why there are web hosting companies whose vast numbers of servers are specifically configured to store websites and to deliver them to internet users.

Web Hosting Companies can on the surface appear to all do the same thing, but in reality there are differences and there are particular features that you need to be aware of. Most of them use either Windows or Linux Operating Systems. For most of us it really doesn’t matter which of these it is but as Linux hosting tends to cost less than Windows hosting, this is the one that most of us choose.

Web Hosting Companies charge a fee for their services. You sign up for a given period of time which can be from months to years. You can pay in one payment or regular monthly payments. Price is therefore a factor to bear in mind when you are choosing a web hosting company.

Many web hosting companies give you a free domain name of your choice (subject to availability) when you use their services, so make sure your chosen one does otherwise you will be paying for your domain name in addition to the hosting charge. Something else to be aware of is the disk space allocated to you. Some web hosting companies set a maximum amount that you may use, yet others have no limits to this amount. This may be an important factor as your website grows in size.

The same goes for bandwith. This refers to how busy your website can be. If you only expect a handful of visitors then it doesn’t really matter but most website owners are looking for as many visitors as possible so, just to be on the safe side, always choose a web hosting company that provides unlimited bandwidth.

If you think that you might want to have more websites in the future then look out for hosting companies that allow unlimited add-on domains. This means that you can add more domain names and therefore more websites all within the same main hosting account, at a later date.

Finally if you are going to be using blogging software like WordPress, or content management systems like Joomla you want to choose a web host that has an easy one click install for these otherwise you will have to set up databases manually which if you have not done it before is no fun at all.

I use the same web hosting company for most of my websites because they offer all of the above. They are less expensive than most web hosting companies and offer free domain names, unlimited add-on domain names, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space. They also have easy installation for WordPress, Joomla etc. I have included a link to them below if you want to see for yourself.

Want to find out more about the web hosting company I use, or visit my site to find out more about What is a Web Hosting Company?.