All about hosting
Hosting is the space where you park your website, and is one
of the least understood and badly used services on the web (see opposite).
One basic confusion is the difference between your ISP (Internet Service
Provider), and a hosting agency. Your ISP gives you access to the Internet.
so when you connect, you connect using their connection. This might be Freeserve,
AOL, Tiscali etc. They often offer free or very cheap hosting, but THIS
IS NOT SUITABLE FOR SME websites. Apart from looking unprofessional, a web
address such as www.johnswebsite.fsnet.co.uk (Freeserve) is not going to
offer the quality of service needed by a small business.
Can we help you with hosting
? Contact us for more information.
When choosing your hosting you also need to think how your
web needs might grow in the future. Good web hosts offer a raft of services
to support your site. At the very least they should offer Front Page and
database support, but do they also offer email spam filtering, and if you
want to contact them how easy will that be.
One of my first customers was hosted with a cheap host, who were impossible
to contact (no phone contact number, & virtually impossible to email).
After 6 months of trying to get the site to work we gave up and started
again. BE WARNED !
You website is given space in the same way as you use space on your hard
disk. so far, so simple. So when hosting agancies say that you can have,
say, 50 megabytes of space, then that is the space they have reserved for
you on their disc. This space is then accessed by other users on the Internet
via a normal telephone line, fibre optic cable etc, which you can compare
to a path leading to your house. If there is only one house at the end of
your path then there will be no problem gaining access, whereas if there
are 100 and each house has one or several visitors you can imagine the traffic
jam.
As a rule of thumb, the cheaper the hosting, the more the traffic jam, which
in real terms will mean that your site will be painfully slow, and at times
inaccessible.