What Does Website Hosting Mean?

Nowadays, everybody wants a piece of the internet and the opportunities that it provides are endless.

It is important that you know what being on the internet entails before you can say that you want to be on the internet. All you need to do to establish an online presence is register a domain name, get website hosting, and have an FTP upload program. Now don't go running away because of all these crazy terminologies, its very simple to understand these three things that you need to have a website online and start making money or developing a presence. Open your mind and prepare to use your noggin for a few minutes and even if you're not internet savvy, you will be able to grasp them no problem. Hang in there and defog your brain for a moment. Think of the internet as an enormous highway and a parking lot sale. Your website is the actual parking lot where you display your items.

 

Registering a domain name is very easy to do. It's basically choosing your name (or parking lot) on the internet. Once you come up with a catchy domain name and check to see if it's available you can register that name and then web hosting normally comes along with it, or at least gets offered to you.

You can register a .com, .net, .org, .tv, .me, .us, .uk, and more. These are all "Top Level Domains" that are available to anyone with internet access. You can find out if a domain name is available by using WHOIS.

 

Regular website hosting and web hosting for small businesses are related. Website hosting is simply a service that you can get through an internet service provider (ISP) for a set monthly or yearly fee.
Typically, website hosting is bundled into a package that you can purchase from your ISP. One such service is small business website hosting which is a package of services that most every small business will need to get their website running. In other cases, website hosting packages consist of email boxes, storage server space and bandwidth choices. Again, don't let your brain fog over.

 

You'll need to know how many email boxes you will need, how much storage space your site will take up on the servers and how much bandwidth you will need -- which is the number of transfer bits involved in your website. The storage space is essentially the size of your parking lot and the email boxes are the number of mail slots that you need. The bandwidth is just the traffic that's in your parking lot.

To calculate your parking lot size, add up the bytes of your website including all the pictures, video, multimedia, etc.

 

Every time someone visits your website, data is transfered in bytes. If your website has 1 megabyte or 1,000 bytes and you receive five visitors per day you will be using 5,000 bytes. Now remember, when you have several pages on your site, most of your visitors will click on every page at least once during their visit so you should account for all of these things when choosing your website hosting plan.

 

Now, after all the website hosting decisions have been made, you will need to determine how to get your website up and running on the ISP's servers. You will most certainly need a file transfer protocol (FTP) program. Don't panic...all this means is that you use this program to get the files of your website from your computer onto your website hosting company's server and make your website live. It is like the fork lift that you would use to put your merchandise on display for the public in your 'parking lot sale.'

Website hosting is definitely NOT a minor decision and while it can be simple and fun, you should carefully choose the company that you will use for your business.