Website Hosting

Prairie Designs offers a premium "one size fits all" web hosting package for only $10 per month.

Website Name
Username

Most people are familiar with a website but have no clue about what exactly is website hosting. In simple terms in order to have you website on the internet you need to place it there. Therefore for this again you need space on the internet. This space can be referred to as cyberspace or web space. This web space will have to bought from web space providers. Along with the web space you will also get other facilities that are part and parcel of this web space. These include email facilities for you to receive and send emails. This whole process of putting your information on the internet by means of a website is referred to as website hosting. This is a specialized job and considering the demand many website hosting companies have come up. Who will host your website on cyberspace for a price.

Just getting cyberspace is not good enough you also need to decide what name you are going to give your website and then have to register that name, quite similar to registering film names. This registration process is referred to as domain registration. Nowadays with the number of websites increasing day by day it is imperative that you should finalize the name and do domain registration as soon as possible or tell your web hosting company to do it for you.

One would wonder why they should involve a website hosting company. Well the reason would be that is a very technical and specialized job and cannot be handled by novices. You can consider getting cyberspace for your website to be similar to renting a house to stay in. Just like you have big and small houses cyberspace can also be big or small. Your space is defined as disk space and network transfer measured in terms of Megabytes (MB)and Gigabytes(GB). Disk space decides the amount of information that you can display on your website. While network transfer, decides in what quantity your data can be downloaded by the seeing your website.

As in the case of renting a house you get a key similarly in the case of cyberspace you get access code by means of a login and password. This login and password is your security and passport to connect to the web server and to mange your website by uploading or downloading the data or accessing email. Your security is further guarded by the presence of server administrators who are there to monitor and help. You can also mange your website hosting account by means of a control panel which is provided to you by the website hosting company. This control panel comes in very useful in configuration and your account management through the web browser such as Internet Explorer.

In terms of facilities the website hosting companies also provide you with different software programs on the server such as Web Server to displays website pages, FTP Server to transfer files to and from the serve, Mail Server to receive and send mail through POP (Post Office Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). You also have Database Server which in case of server side scripting allows you have dynamic data accessible to the user instead of simply the information on the website. The databases can be administered through Microsoft SQL Server (available only on Windows) and MySQL (common for Linux and UNIX but also available on Windows) while the SQL Server comes with it's own administration client.

These all are available on the server side while you also have software programs on your computer to mange your website such as Web Site or Page Editor, to edit your website and web pages. While the FTP Client allows you to interact with your website and displays all the server folders and files on to your computer as regular files and folders open for editing.

Web hosting a complex process which can be done either by professional website hosting companies or you can do it yourself. Both the methods have there own pros and cons. While choosing a company make sure you have clear idea about what all are there duties and charges for all. You can also do some things yourself and leave others to them to save cost.