Should Your Organization Be on the Net? - a Quick Study on Web Hosting

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Praveen Jayaraj

What is Web Hosting?

Generally speaking, web hosting means building an Internet presence for your organization, be it a commercial corporate entity, school, or nonprofit organization. But technically speaking, web hosting refers to deploying an organization's website or a personal website into a web server on the Internet. Any organization can benefit from an external Internet presence, using e-mail, maintaining Web pages or FTP sites. How do you put your business or organization on the Net?

The logical steps to be followed are preparing what information you want to be put on the Net, converting that information into well designed web pages and finally transferring the respective files into a web server on the Net.

Steps Involved in Web Hosting

Constructing a suitable and informative website is the major step involved in web hosting. For this, a written plan has to be made that outlines what information you are trying to convey and to which intended audience. A good place to begin is an inventory of the information you want to dispense. The most popular and efficient architecture used for web hosting is the client-server architecture.

Simply speaking, the clent-server architecture is the technology in which the computers through which people access different websites are designated as clients and the computers which provide the necessary information for the clients on requests are designated as servers. Simply building your website on your local machine does not make your site available to people using the Net.

So after designing an efficient site with the help of the various web designing tools, the next process is to find a Web Presence Provider which will make your site available on a host computer that is connected to the Internet on a continuous basis.

Web Presence Providers for Web Hosting

There are free Web Presence Providers as well as paid ones. For maintaining a business web site nowadays, one has to spend about 25 dollars a month and for a personal site one has to spend about 15 dollars a month. Of course you can host on free web servers but many are not reliable and there is no guarantee that your site will be there for a long period.

Web Presence Providers are the companies that provide your site a fixed address known as an IP address and these companies own computers that act as servers on which they can host your site. These servers are online continuously and have very fast Internet connections. They can usually provide you with information such as how many times your site is viewed (site traffic) and which pages are most popular.

Once your website is present on the host computer, the hosting company will give you a way to find the website on the World Wide Web by assigning an IP address for your site. Usually this type of IP number is difficult to remember. So the hosting company will provide you with an easier address, usually beginning with "www". For example, www.bbcworld.com takes you to the website of the BBC.

The actual IP address of your site is resolved to this user friendly address by computers known as domain name severs.