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Chapter 1: What Is Web Hosting?Most people never really think about where a website is, or even what a website is. I turn on my computer, open a browser, and go to Google or Amazon or Yahoo.
But what am I doing when I “visit” a website? If I’m a visitor, where have I gone? And if it is a “site,” where is it located?
What will you learn in this chapter:
What a website really is.Three different types of websites (and why they’re mostly the same).Where a website “lives.”What a hosting company is.Skip this chapter if… You have used web hosting before and have a good understanding of what a website is and how they work.
What Is a Website?To understand where a website is located, it’s helpful to understand what it is.
We can roughly divide websites into three types (there is some overlap here — these are not strict categories, but they are helpful for thinking about this):
Collection of documents or pages: This is the original type of website. Every page is a file in a public-facing directory. When you look at a web page, your computer is literally downloading the file and showing it to you.
Web applications: Google, your web-based email provider, Facebook, and any online games you might play are all examples of web applications. Much like apps you run on your phone, tablet, or desktop, the files for the app have to exist somewhere.With web apps, they sit on public-facing web server the same way documents and files do. Your browser downloads some of the files and runs them, and there is constant communication between your computer and the web server.
Content management systems: This is sort of a hybrid, and accounts for the vast majority of websites that exist today. The technology of a web application is used to simulate a collection of documents.If you read a blog, each blog post is probably not an individual file. Rather, the application is pulling the content out of a database and sending it to your browser as if it were a document, and your browser shows it to you without knowing any different.
There’s some additional complications we don’t really need to get into here, but the important thing is that when you visit a website, a series of things are happening:
Your computer’s browser sends a request to the website’s server for something — a page, a document, a file for running an application. The URL or address you put into the bar at the top of the browser window is the main portion of that request.
The web server receives the request and pulls together whatever it needs to deliver back to you what you requested. This might just be an existing file, or it might be a piece of a web application, or it might be an assembled document from a content management system.
The web server responds to the request with some kind of content.
Your browser shows that content to you.

Running a WebsiteSo, in order to run a website, you need a computer connected to the internet that is capable of receiving requests, taking appropriate action, and responding.
When people talk about servers for their website, this is all they are talking about: computers that store the files needed to run a website, along with the software to deliver those files to anyone who asks for them.
You could, in theory, run a website from your home desktop computer, but that would be a terrible idea. There are many reasons for this:
You’d have to know how to set it up properly to run a website (which is not a trivial matter).
You’d have to leave it on and connected to the internet all the time.
Your computer at home is only designed to deal with one user at a time. If a lot of people started trying to look at your website, your computer and your internet connection would both reach their limits and your website would stop working.
Better than running a website on a personal desktop computer, you could buy a server. This is just a bigger, faster, better computer.
Assuming you could afford it (they’re expensive) and assuming you could set it all up properly (it’s not easy) and assuming you could get a fast enough internet connection with a lot of bandwidth (expensive and not always available), you could then run your website from that server.
Obviously, this is a terrible idea. Too expensive, too complicated, too difficult.

Web Hosting CompaniesWeb hosting companies have solved this problem for you. They have bought the big expensive computers, they have set them up to work for running a website, they have made sure they have a fast connection to the internet. They’ve done all the work.
When you get a web hosting plan, you are borrowing a bit of one of their computers (or a whole one, sometimes). This lets you put the files and software needed to run your website somewhere that it can easily be accessed by anyone who wants to view it.
To make this easier for you, they also provide tools for managing your piece of the computer and for building and running your website.
When you use a web hosting company for your website, your website isn’t in a cloud somewhere or floating in an alternate dimension. It is a collection of real, actual computer files sitting on a real actual computer somewhere, in a real building.
Where that building is, and what that computer looks like will depend on which hosting company you use. And you may never see the computer or even know where in the world it is.
But it’s not magic, and it’s not that much different than the computer you are using right now.
SummaryA website is a collection of files that sit on a computer. For a website to work well, a regular desktop computer isn’t a good choice.
Web hosting companies provide fast, powerful computers so that anyone can run a website without having any special knowledge or buying any special equipment.
Chapter 2: Different Types of Hosting
When you start looking to purchase a web hosting plan, it’s easy to start getting overwhelmed by all the different options available.
Rather than trying to sort out what to buy while reading feature lists written by marketers, it’s better to start by figuring what kind of hosting you need.
What will you learn in this chapter?
The difference between shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting.What “cloud based” hosting is.What managed hosting is, and why you may or may not need it.How to decide what type of hosting plan is right for you.Shared Hosting
The most common form of web hosting is called “shared hosting.” It is the least expensive and, as you might guess, the least powerful.
With shared hosting, several web hosting customers share the same computer. All of the websites of all the different accounts are stored in the same drive, processed by the same CPU, and delivered by the same web server.
It’s easy to see why this is less expensive than other options. The hosting company is allocating relatively few resources to you.
Limitations of Shared HostingOf course, there are downsides. All the websites from all of the accounts are all competing for the same scarce computer resources.
The servers that hold shared hosting plan sites are much larger and more powerful than your home computer, so they can host hundred of websites without any problem — as long as none of the sites are too popular or need too many resources.
Find the best shared hosting companies and plans in our reviews section.
Every page load, every image and asset file, requires a little bit of attention from the web server when someone requests it.
If you are running a complex web application or a content management system, this could require more than a trivial amount of processor power to query a database, assemble content into a page, or take some other action. Individually, these things can be so fast as to seem instantaneous.
But multiplied over hundreds or thousands of visitors in a few minutes, and you have a recipe for site crashing.
If the popular site is someone else’s on the same server, you’ll experience performance lags and downtime without ever knowing why. If you are the lucky one getting a lot of traffic, you can expect your site to become unavailable right when you most need to shine.
Additionally, you may find yourself running afoul of your hosting company’s unstated but very much in-force limitations on usage and bandwidth.
Customization and SecurityThe other downside to shared hosting is the inability to customize the hosting environment. This might not make any difference to you. If you are just running a straightforward WordPress blog (for example), you can get by just fine without having to tweak your environment.
Another problem to note about shared hosting is that it can open your website up to a certain amount of risk. No matter how careful you are in securing your web applications, other people might leave their software vulnerable to attack and provide an entry point for attacks that affect your site as well.
Also, you share the same IP address with other sites on the same server. If one of them is using their account to send spam email, or is engaging in other bad behavior, you may find your sites being blocked by email filters and content firewalls. The worst part about this problem is that you might not even know it’s happening.
Dedicated Server Hosting
With dedicated server hosting, you have complete control over an entire server. This has many advantages, but it is also more expensive and more complicated.
When you have direct and complete access to the server that is running your website, you can install any kind of niche software you like, make changes to the operating system or language interpreters, tweak configuration settings.
For certain applications, like running an enterprise management system or building custom software, you need this level of control.
The other major advantage to a dedicated server is that you are the only one consuming server resources. This significantly increases your speed and performance.
Of course, if you are able to do anything you want on your server, you also become responsible for doing pretty much everything that needs to be done. This includes keeping all the software up to date and debugging issues if you accidentally create any weird conflicts or problems.
Dedicated server hosting can be very expensive also. With shared hosting, there might be 100 customers on a single server. With a dedicated server, you are the only one — and the difference in cost reflects that.
Virtual Private Server
Somewhere between shared hosting (a lot of people on one server) and dedicated hosting (one account on a server), is Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting.
In this model, you have your own dedicated server, but the server is a virtual machine, not a physical one. This provides a mix of the benefits (and disadvantages) of both shared and dedicated hosting plans.
With VPS hosting, you have complete control over the environment, just as you would with a dedicated server. This is especially helpful if you are developing custom applications or are running a SaaS (software-as-as-service) business.
You generally have much more access to server resources with VPS hosting as compared to shared hosting.
While the various virtual machines are all sharing server resources, there are usually many fewer of them on a server in a VPS environment. You are alloted a much larger portion of the overall computing power and bandwidth.
There also many fewer security issues. VPS accounts have their IP address, and the virtualization layer means that you are insulated from any problems that might arise from problems on other sites.