If you’re new to website development then you have probably come across the term ‘hosting’ but may not be sure exactly what it means.  Here is a quick explanation:

Hosting is basically the computer on which you store your website.  When you create a document on your home or office computer in a program like Word or Excel, you save it to the hard disk of your computer so that you can open it again later.

A website must also be saved somewhere, but it needs to be available for everyone on the internet to open and view, not just you.  So instead of storing it on your own computer, you can pay a hosting company to store it on their ’server’, a large computer that is connected to the internet 24 hours a day and is designed specifically to ‘host’ websites.

There are all sorts of special features that your hosting company can provide, including an online control panel to manage technical aspects of your site, email administration and even the ability to install web based programs such as Wordpress at the click of a button.

However, there are a few basics that you should know about:

Reliability

Many hosting companies will advertise a feature such as 99.9% up time.  This means that on average the server (and therefore your website) will be functioning properly 99.9% of the time.  No one can guarantee 100% up time, but it is important to find a reliable host because if your website keeps going offline then you will be missing out on visits from potential customers and it could give a bad impression about your organisation.

Storage Capacity

As the name suggests, this is the amount of information that you can store on your hosting account.  Simple websites only require a few MB of space but if you have a large site with lots of pictures, animations, videos, music etc then you could need much more.  Many hosting companies now offer Unlimited storage capacity so you don’t need to worry about how big your website grows.

Bandwidth

The visitors to your website will be spread around the world and viewing your site from their own computers.  Therefore, in order for them to see your website, your hosting company’s server must send your website data over the internet to all of these different computers.  This requires your hosting server to do work, which is measures by the quantity of information (MB) that it sends each month.  A maximum amount of information per month may be set by your hosting company, and is referred to as bandwidth.   The amount of bandwidth that you need is mainly affected by two things: 1. The number of visitors to your site and 2. The size of the files on your website.   Some hosting companies now offer hosting with unlimited bandwidth.

Compatibility

If you want to host anything more than a very basic website, then you need to check that the hosting that you buy is compatible with any technologies that you intend to use.  For example, systems such as WordPress and Magento are basically pieces of software that run on your hosting server to make your website function correctly.  Just like when you buy a piece of software for your home or office computer, you need to check that your computer meets the operating requirements of the software.  It is easy to check, as your hosting company will be able to tell you whether they can run the technologies that you need.

At Semi-skimmed, we host all of our websites with Dreamhost.  We’ve found them to be extremely reliable, have great customer service and provide excellent value for money with unlimited storage capacity and unlimited bandwidth.  It’s also carbon neutral.

If you have any questions or comments relating to this article then please feel free to post them below.