Dereck J asked:


ng is a type of Internet Hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to publish their own website accessible online via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients.

Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored or cheap whereas Business web site hosting often has a higher expense. In case of paid web hosting, one has complete control over the site contents.

If your website is too large and complex, it is seen that is receives a lot of traffic. In this case we find that shared hosting can limit your growth and the capacity to serve your customers. It may be the time to switch on to Dedicated hosting. Shared hosting involves placing many websites on one server. All sites share the resources of that server such as disk space and bandwidth. Dedicated hosting means that instead of renting space on a server, you rent an entire server for your sole use. It’s much more expensive than shared hosting because the cost of operating the server is not divided between various accounts.

The advantages of dedicated hosting include the freedom to use the resources of the server as you like and as per your requirements. Faster processors and bigger hard drives cost more. Another factor that can influence the price is whether the server is managed or unmanaged. A managed hosting service offers the support and expertise to maintain your server and to perform routine maintenance such as software upgrades. This kind of service can be a viable alternative to hiring your own staff to look after your servers. Managed hosting can be a lot more expensive than unmanaged hosting.

Choosing one between managed or unmanaged hosting depends mainly on the technical requirements of your site and the ability of you or your staff to manage a server efficiently so that it is running at peak efficiency. Go with managed hosting if you prefer to have the re-assurance of having highly trained professionals looking after the server. If you or your staff can handle most of the maintenance chores, you would be better off with an unmanaged server.

Someone who is new to web hosting may find it really confusing to decide in which platform their server should be on. There come a wide number of choices available but the main two are Linux and Windows web servers. Quite probably it does not matter which server you use. For the majority of people it will be far more important to choose a really good web host than to worry about the server-type that they implement.

Windows operating system is developed and owned by Microsoft whereas Linux is open source and generally free. This means it can often be more expensive to set up and run a Windows server. Despite the general opinion that Windows servers are more expensive to run, buying a Windows hosting package can often turn out to be just as cheap as or even cheaper than an equivalent Linux hosting packages. The natural assumption of some people going for buying a windows hosting package just because of the reason their PC run Windows is not true. As access to your web account will most likely be through FTP or a control panel and both servers support these methods. The main difference is that some of the FTP commands are slightly different between Linux and Windows.
The majority of web features run fine on both platforms including PHP, mySQL, POP3 etc. If you intend to create your site using ASP, FrontPage, the .NET environment, Windows Streaming Media, Access, MSSQL, or any of the other Microsoft proprietary technologies then you probably need to use a Windows host. There is limited support for a number of these technologies in Linux, but they can be expensive and are usually lacking in features. In terms of performance there’s not a huge difference between the two servers. Linux reportedly performs faster because Windows attempts to offer an ‘all in one’ package instead of the extendable Linux implementation. If you are looking on the security issue then make sure that the Web hosting company is reputable and highly skilled than to worry about the server they use.