Web Hosting Tips

Web Hosting Tips

Here I’ll collect some common questions to introduce the knowledge about web hosting! If you’re interested in, welcome to Follow me on Twitter.

What is web hosting?

Web Hosting is a service provided by hundreds of companies worldwide in order to “host” and provide websites for anyone on the internet to see. Web Hosting often involves a number of very large computers, called servers, in a secure location, called a data centre which is air conditioned, maintains a high amount of security and has a very fast connection to the internet.

Servers offer a varied amount of services, technologies and protocols for multiple online applications, such as the website itself, email access, mobile access, multiple databases and more.

To have a website online, you must have web hosting. Web hosting provides you with the space you will need to keep the files for your website online, as well as a secure static position where the site resides to.

What is Disk Space?

Disk space is the amount of physical space you are allocated when choosing a new web host. Disk space is exactly the same as the space you have available on your home computer – it is measured in the same units (GB & MB) and means the same thing.

Websites themselves often don’t take up much space, but this depends on what the website offers. When choosing a new web host, you will have to take the amount of disk space they offer into consideration and make sure it is enough for your needs.

Bare in mind that the disk space web hosting companies offer often also include the amount of space you are allowed on your email accounts. If you’re planning on having a lot of email accounts set-up for a lot of different people, then this may begin to take up a lot of space depending on the email services that you decide to use.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth and Data Transfer is often confused and sometimes called the same thing with a number of web hosting companies, where in fact they are two different things.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can potentially be transferred from one point to another, whereas Data Transfer is the amount of data actually being transferred at any one time.

Because Bandwidth and Data Transfer are often confused, you will sometimes find Bandwidth measured on a data-amount per month basis, such as 10Gb / Month. This means the web hosting company is limiting your account to transferring 10Gb’s of data each month.

There are a multitude of things on a website that can take up Bandwidth or Data Transfer, but the first thing that can be reduced is the amount of images. If there is one large image on your websites homepage which is 500KB and you get 300 different people look at your site in one month, then you will use 1.5GB’s of Data Transfer that month – and this does not include the HTML file which serves the image, along with any other images on the site, perhaps a CSS file, and perhaps other pages or images!

It is important to work out the size of your site and then amount of people you are hoping to get visit it on a per-month basis before deciding on the package you will go for with your new web hosting company.

It is always desired to try and reduce the amount of Bandwidth or Data Transfer a website uses which is sometimes relatively easy to do. It usually involves reducing the amount of images the website uses, or at the very least, optimizing the images to reduce their filesize. Styles embedded directly into the pages on your site can be placed into an external CSS stylesheet to reduce each pages’ filesize even further, and by doing this will also allow easier and quicker updating of styles in the future, as well as quicker page loading times for your visitors.

What is a Hosting Server?

A web server is a number of large computers, known as servers, housed in an air-conditioned server house known as a data centre where they are connected to a highly efficient, fault-tolerance high-speed internet connection.

Web servers are able to handle hundreds of thousands of requests a second and can return back this information quickly, providing the visitor of a website with the information they were looking for in no time at all.

It is big business to keep servers online – this is called uptime and it is the measurement of how long as server is online and functional for during the period of a month, or year. A lot of hosting companies boast their servers have 99.9% uptime, which means 99.9% of the time (per month) their servers are online and functional, meaning all websites hosted on their servers will be working.

There are many different types of web server available, such as dedicated servers, load balancing servers, database servers and many more. If you’re just starting out on the web and need the basic type of web server, look out for fully managed shared hosting, which means the hosting company maintains the server you’re on, along with the other people that share it. Its often the cheapest solution if you’re a beginner.

What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is a like a sign post within the internet, it simply points to a server and asks the server to return the information the user or visitor is looking for. A domain is, quite simple, www.google.com or www.example.com

All domain names are unique throughout the internet, although there are several parts to them. The www. part to the domain name is, effectively, a sub-domain of the domain itself. It is often not required, and sometimes website owners prefer not to include the www. part of their web address.

Domain name can end in a multitude of letters too, to indentify what the site is about, or what country it is from. You are probably familiar with 4 or 5 “endings”, often known as TLD’s, but there are hundreds.

A few, for example, the obvious ones – .com, .co.uk, .net, .info, but there are many others such as .tel, .gov, .edu, .to, .me, .ms and many others.

What is cPanel?

cPanel is a web-based program or application that is used to control the settings of your website and can be accessed via It is widely used throughout most web hosts and is almost always installed for you as part of your new account signup.

cPanel has an easy to use icon-based interface where you are able to add, edit and remove email accounts (depending on the limitations of your hosting package), setup email forwarders and auto-replies, modify files directly, manage your databases, setup CRONs and much more.

The features on cPanel are usually limited by the package you have opted for and the limitations of the web host you chose. You will usually find that web hosts will limit the amount of email addresses you are able to have setup, for example, and this number if reflected in the cPanel of your site.