What exactcly is Web Hosting?
What is web hosting?
The service of web hosting is for saving and displaying web pages to the Internet. Web hosting companies are taking the duty of offering the required infrastructure so that anybody can publish on the web. All of this structure can be quite complex and expensive to manage as you will see in this article.
The task of hosting web pages is not as simple as it seems to be. The world wide web is always available to anybody. Still, any web hosting company can not guarantee that their servers will be running 100% of the time. Server maintenance is always required at some time. They are also vulnerable to adverse weather conditions creating all kinds of electric or other problems. So the environment is always stressful because these companies know that their customers depend on them.
Now, to host a high number of websites, expensive equipment and installations are required. Your usual home computer is not the same type of machine they require. They need the most performing computers available on the market and those must be constantly upgraded as their hosting service becomes more and more popular. All of these servers use a very big amount of power and are producing a lot of heat. For any of these companies, their servers are installed in an air conditioned room to keep them running smoothly. The servers are mounted in racks or blades to save more room and are usually installed on a raised floor. This is so that they don’t get damaged by water if a plumbing problem would occur in the building. Most of the web hosting companies also have some industrial backup generators to deal with power failures.
It is also important to be aware that the web hosting companies have to connect all of their servers to a backbone provider. A backbone provider is also called a network service provider (NSP). So we could say that the backbone provider is like the ISP of the web hosting company. This allows them to have access to the high speed Internet trunk lines and thus to make it available to their customers. NSPs are very costly and they sell network access by bandwidth. This bandwidth is bought by the web host which then resells it to their customers.
So you probably realize by now that the structure of any web hosting company is quite complex. To deal with the high operational costs, the web hosts do business in volume. Each web server can display and host thousands of web sites. So every time a new web site is added to a server, the overall cost per customer is going to diminish since there is only a specific amount of money needed to maintain a single server. Yet, a single server must not be overloaded. If that was to happen, it would cause a severe drop in the server’s performance. Therefore, the web host has to constantly be in harmony between the performance of the server versus the high operational costs needed.
As mentioned earlier, all those hosted web sites have to be running 24/7. On top of all the costs we already talked about, we now have to add the human cost. There must always be a staff on location, even on holidays. This also means weekends but usually, the staff available is for the most part technical support.
Finally, you now know all the pieces of the puzzle required for web sites to be visible on the Internet. When you combine all the hardware, software, networking and also the very important human factor, you get what creates the Internet today.
There are literally thousands of web hosts on the Internet. If you are interested in creating your site and having it hosted, you can find the best web hosting companies here.
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