First and foremost, for non-IT savvy, it might be a little tough
for them to comprehend the meaning of web hosting. I believe
if you search it on any search engine, of course there will be
answer and explanation for them. But, how far do you really understand?
Honestly, when I first get to know this term few years back,
I had problem understanding myself. Then, I found one simple
explanation that might be easy for people to understand. So,
today, if anyone were to ask me what is "web hosting",
i'd explain as follows...
Imagine you are homeless and you want to rent a room or buy
a house. In order to get a shelter for yourself, you need a
room. So, you imagine yourself as the website and the room
as the hosting that you need to place yourself in. That means
your website need a web hosting. Then, that's the time you
start finding yourself a web hosting provider. Here, web hosting
provider would be the house owner who rents you the room. So,
in order for your website to be available and browsed by Internet
users, you need to make sure your website is hosted in a web
server provided by a web hosting provider.
So, when you finally understand what web hosting is, next
will be the time to find out more about the different types
of web hosting available. You have shared hosting, dedicated
hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and colocation hosting.
You name it, the Internet has it! So many to remember and differentiate..so,
let's get the ball rolling with...
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting means that a web server has its resources shared
by many other websites. Or you can put it as, in a house, there
are many tenants. Usually small or normal e-commerce businesses
will choose this type of hosting. Websites with high traffic
might not be able to choose this type of hosting due to insufficient
webspace.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting refers to hosting in which you rent a server
from your web hosting provider and will be placed at your web
hosting provider's datacentre. They will provide software installation
and connection to Internet. This will indicates that the website
owner has control over the server as they don't share it with
other websites. In short, dedicated hosting is where only 1
user hosted on the server machine and have a full privilege
over the server to manage it by themself. The server machine
will be still belongs to the web hosting provider.
Colocation Hosting
Well, this hosting has the features which are almost the same
as dedicated hosting EXCEPT that you provide your own server
and web hosting provider just help you to plug it into their
datacentre. You need to install own software and hardwares.
Everything is DIY.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting is a hosting where the account owner has the
priviledge to allocate the webspace and bandwidth access and
resell them to his clients. This shows that reseller hosts
act like a middleman and is usually not responsible for any
software or hardware intallation. They only buy webspace and
resell to clients.
VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is almost the same
as dedicated server. Hence, it's sometimes called Virtual Dedicated
Server. Generally, it means that the account owner has the
feeling as though his owns a dedicated server. In real sense,
it's actually separating a physical server into several independent
hosting spaces or VPS-es, each isolated from the other. This
will allow you to create and manage multiple sites and domains
and take full control of your VPS with root/administrator access
which allows you to access the virtual hard disk, RAM and to
reboot your private server independently from other VPS-es.
Domain Name
After we are done with the different types of hosting, there
is something else which I want to touch on. It is none other
than the "domain name". So, ever wonder what is domain
name? Wow, sounds technical? Not really actually. Don't be
scared. Last time, when I saw the words domain name, it freaked
me out too. Now, when I got used to it, it's not that nerve-wracking
after all. So, domain name is just the normal web address or
url (Uniform Resource Locator) you type in the "address" area
when you open a browser. Examples of domain name are "exabytes.com".
You know? Just the normal web address. Well, since it's a web
address, it's a unique name. Hence, there will be no other
same domain name. In fact, domain name is actually corresponding
with numeric IP address. So, every domain name will have its
numeric IP address. For example, the IP address for exabytes.com
is 72.18.131.206
When you see exabytes.com, ever wonder ".com" stands
for what? It actually stands for commercial. Whenever you see
.com, .org, .net or others which ends after the final dot or
period (.) of a url, it is known as top-level domain. It actually
tells you what kind of website it is, indirectly. And the commonly
used domain name extension nowadays will be .org, .net, .com.
However, there are a lot of new domain extension up for grab
lately such as .aero, .info, .museum, and .name. Next in the
list that I shall explain is, Country Level Domain Name. Examples
of country level domain name is exabytes.com.my. It has ".my" as
its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). .my here represents
the country "Malaysia". Of course, different country
will have different ccTLD. For example, .jp stands for Japan,
.au for Australia, .ca for Canada.
There are more to learn in order to excel in web hosting industry.
Hopefully this simple guide will help all those novice out
there. There are other things you need to know as well. But,
it will be in my next article. Cheers!
