Written by Anastasia Kurmakaeva
The hosting or web hosting is a service that offers the user a virtual space to store information in the form of files, images, videos, etc. as, for example, the information of a web page.
Hosting or web hosting is a service that offers the user a virtual space to store information.
To publish a website, you have to decide what type of hosting you need. One of the first options is to decide whether to host it on your own server or whether it is more convenient to hire the hosting services of a specialized external company. The most recommended is that, unless there are insurmountable technical constraints, such as connection requirements with the company’s ERP or CRM, confidential information that you do not want to leave your own facilities, etc. contract a web hosting service from a recognized company in the sector.
It should be noted that if you decide to host a website on your own server, you will have to pay for all the costs associated with:
- Costs of the server itself and the corresponding operating system, database, special components, etc. licenses.
- The server’s own connection to the network. A sufficient upload bandwidth (from the server to the users’ browsers) must be contracted to provide a good service for the expected traffic volume.
- Ensure server integrity and security against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, virus infection, code injection, etc.
- Implement backup solutions that allow you to quickly recover your website in case of infection, file corruption, disk malfunction, etc.
- Implement redundancy solutions to avoid service failures due to server, disk, Internet connection or power supply failures.
Professionally managing an Internet server and guaranteeing a high availability service is no easy task. In most cases, it will be cheaper and easier to hire the hosting services of a specialized hosting company.
All web hosting companies usually offer different hosting plans. The cost of each plan is generally associated with a series of factors that must be decided at the time of contracting, such as:
- Available space: Once hosted on a server, the website will occupy a certain amount of space in megabytes on a hard disk. The larger the website, the more space it will occupy on the server and the more expensive its monthly hosting will be.
- Monthly transfer: This is the amount of information that users will be able to download from your website in gigabytes per month. The more traffic your site generates, the more bandwidth it will also consume and the more expensive the monthly website hosting fee will be.
- Type of server technology: Typically, a Windows server with Microsoft SQL Server database will be more expensive than a Linux server with MySQL database due to the cost of proprietary software licenses.
In addition to these factors, it should be taken into account what guarantee of uptime free of failures the server offers, as well as other components that may be of interest to e-commerce: sending monthly newsletters by e-mail, configuration of anti-spam filters, guarantee of backup copies, payment gateways, certificates, virus and attack control, etc.
Housing, dedicated servers or shared servers
The server solutions offered by hosting companies usually include four types or levels of service:
- Housing: Service to host the client’s server in the data center.
- Dedicated servers: Service in which a complete server is rented for a client.
- Shared virtual servers: Service that offers a part of the resources of a server exclusively to a client.
- Standard Hosting: This is the most basic level of Web hosting. It will be the first option offered by web hosting companies and also the one with the lowest price. It consists of a server in which its resources are shared by several clients.
