Web Hosting for Starters #Part 1

By Pachi | Jun 30, 2008

This is the first part of the 3 part Web hosting for starters series.

I remember the first time I was to host a website, spent hours and hours reading reviews, and scanning through hosting sites and was still confused on which to go for.

In this post, I’ll be introducing you to web hosting, and to better understand web hosting, little theory on it.

What is web hosting?
Web hosting is basically storing your data on computers(read servers), which can be accessed through Internet. The websites you access(Yes, including this), the videos you watch on youtube are all hosted on servers which are connected to the Internet. These servers are capable of running for months together, some, even years, without the need to reboot(the ones that need, use windows, just kidding!). All these servers use a special software called ’server’, which enables us to access them using protocols like HTTP(http://), FTP(ftp://) etc.

If you are planning to have your own website, you will need upload your website into such servers.

How can I host my website?
There are many ways of doing this. You can either rent hosting space from zillions of Internet Service Providers(ISPs) or host it yourself.

If you, yourself plan to host your website, then you will need a server equipped with all these tools, and of course good Internet Connection. It is not often, not worth hosting websites yourself, as it requires too much maintenance, Power backup, data backup, Temperature maintenance etc, hence most of us go in for renting web space. Renting web space is not at all costly, it is very much affordable.

I will be covering this in detail in my next post.

Little theory on how Internet works
The website address that we use, like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com etc are called URL(Universal Resource Locator), and they exist only to facilitate us in remembering their actually address, the IP. When we type a website address(called URL, Uniform Resource Locator) such as www.google.com, this is sent to Domain Name Service Providers to decode it, and retrieve the IP address of the google servers. IP address, is the address given of the computer, which can be used to access it.

Once IP address is retrieved, by our computer, it sends request for the page that we want to access. The server on receiving the request processes it and delivers the appropriate webpage. For the server to process the clients data and deliver the results, it will be equipped with relevant softwares - server, Interpreter/~~Compiler~~ to process the request etc

Didn’t get it? Don’t worry, you’ll understand once you start hosting your site.

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19 Comments so far

Jetru July 9, 2008 2:22 am

Ur miserable ADS suck. Please remove them. Ads in the middle of content is the most annoying thing.
Jetru July 9, 2008 2:24 am

OMG, how did compiler come here dude…
Jetru July 9, 2008 2:25 am

OMG ur contentlink s*** is still there.
Pachi July 9, 2008 2:47 am

@Jetru
Was experimenting with kontera ads, have removed it now, as revenue from it sucked and damaged the usability. Thanks for your “polite” feedback

If you knew ‘C’, ‘C++’, etc are used for backend processing by websites which require high processing, eg: search engines
Jetru July 9, 2008 2:48 am

there’s still google ads da. in between!
ya da, they don’t compile them in runtime when a request is online…
Pachi July 9, 2008 2:52 am

Google ads are contextual ads and ads are relevant to content, they are more useful than annoying…

ah.. right.. will change it.. what is the correct technical word to be used there?
Jetru July 9, 2008 2:54 am

dude…how can u possibly claim they aren’t annoying. they are. hold a poll if u want.
i dunno.
Pachi July 9, 2008 2:59 am

lol… if ads are annoying to you please consider donating and help me recover my hosting costs. I’ll be more than happy to remove them.

Just noticed adsense ads on your blog… maybe your blog is hacked or something… lol
Jetru July 9, 2008 3:00 am

Ya da. Adsense is on the side. urs is in the content. While I was reading I thought u had typed in links to MEGA HOSTING PLAN. But it was google ads.
Pachi July 9, 2008 3:05 am

As far as the reader is concerned, your focus should be on the content and not the source of content, what difference does it make to the reader if the relevant content is put by the author or a bot? If you find it useful use it, or just neglect it…
Jetru July 9, 2008 3:07 am

OK BUY A PLAN NOW I will SUPER SERVICE think about 500RS ONLY it.
Pachi July 9, 2008 3:12 am

thanks a lot… and here is the plugin for you.. to remove ads and other things if it annoys you… http://adblockplus.org/

or else you can subscribe to my feeds so that you can get posts straight to your inbox - http://feeds.feedburner.com/arbitblog

thanks a lot for showing interest in my blog
Jetru July 9, 2008 3:14 am

yapaa. k.
Web Hosting for Starters | Arbit Blog July 29, 2008 4:03 am

[...] Part 1 - Introduction to web hosting [...]
nemokami skelbimai July 19, 2009 8:02 am

nice
nemokami skelbimai July 20, 2009 1:53 am

nice :-/ internet going crazy
Grace January 30, 2010 10:13 pm

What you dislike in another take care to correct in yourself.
green web hosting May 5, 2010 1:47 am

I really enjoyed your article. Choosing the right hositng is valuable and a very important decision. Thanks for the valuable information that you provided.
Poxiran2010 July 22, 2010 12:25 am

As far as the reader is concerned, your focus should be on the content and not the source of content, what difference does it make to the reader if the relevant content is put by the author or a bot? If you find it useful use it, or just neglect it…