subject: The Basics Of The Website Hosting Business [print this page] Web hosting is quite simply the service of preserving and displaying Web pages to the World Wide Web. The hosting company is the entity that allows individuals and businesses to show content on the Internet. The actual mechanics of web hosting can get quite complicated.
These hosting companies are not the same as Internet service providers (ISPs). In order to access the Internet everyone needs an ISP. A Web hosting company will be needed though if you want to publish a Web site. In some cases, Internet service providers give free web space in order to allow their clients to have a personal Web site. If you require a Web site for business purposes you'll definitely want a company that specializes in Web hosting only.
Serving Web pages is not quite as easy as it may sound. Web sites need to be operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. This puts an incredible amount of stress on both the people and the equipment that operate in a Web hosting environment.
There is a very large overhead involved with this industry. Top of the line computers are needed to keep up with the high demands that are placed on them. These expensive computers, also called Web servers, require a large amount of power and get extremely hot. This means even more power is required to keep the servers cool. In addition, the computers should be kept in a special data center environment that is kept clean and cold. Large air conditioning units are used to pump in cold air directly to the computers. A good Web hosting company will also have industrial size generators in case of a power outage.
Web hosting companies must also connect their Web servers to a backbone provider. Backbone providers are called network service providers. These companies provide direct network access to the Internet. This network access is sold by bandwidth. A Web host will buy a certain amount of bandwidth in order to sell to their customers. The definition of bandwidth is volume of information transmitted across a given communications line in a specific period of time.
The back-end structure of the Web hosting business is rather complicated. To balance the high operational costs Web hosting companies deal in volume. Web servers can present 1000's of Web sites per server. Seeing that it takes a certain amount of money to keep a Web server running constantly, each new site will reduce the cost per customer.
But, hosting too many Web sites on one server will start to decrease the speed and performance of the sites hosted on it. Then customers will experience the speed of their Web sites begin to slow down and might start to see general page errors when trying to load their site. A balance must be maintained by the Web hosting company between operational costs and server performance.
Web sites must be running all the time. This increases the human costs beyond that of a normal business. The hosting company must maintain a staff on location at all times. Instead of just one 8 hour shift there are three 8 hour shifts. Weekends must be covered too. Usually though, off hours staff are there in a technical support capacity only.
In conclusion, Web hosting is a combination of computer hardware, software, network technologies and human ingenuity. This combination of man and machine is what makes the Internet what it is today.
by: li baocai
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