Do you need a clear and concise explanation of all the major Web hosting definitions and offerings such as VPS (Virtual Private Server), dedicated servers, up-time guarantee, managed servers, domains, and more?

Creating a website can be daunting without a good grasp on all the major Web hosting terms. What’s more, many hosting services offer different combinations of technologies to create Web hosting packages that may or may not be right for your blog or website.

This article provides clear definitions of many of the most common Web hosting technologies, terms and services and provides guidance on selecting the right one based on your needs.

Web hosting definitions explained

I’m not going to list a bunch of Web hosting terms and provide definitions – you can search on Wikipedia for that. Instead, I want to provide definitions and explanations of how the various terms relate to each other and work together to produce a Web hosting package that suits your needs.

Domains & domain names

A domain can be thought of as the address of a website on the Internet. The domain of SEO Entrepreneur is seo-entrepreneur.com.

There are many domain registrars (services that register domain names on your behalf), but many hosting companies provide domain registration services along with their Web hosting packages.

Registering a domain name with your Web hosting company saves time because you won’t have to muck about with IP addresses and name servers.

Web hosting

A Web host offers an online file system, database, bandwidth and other facilities that are required to operate a website online.

This is distinct from the website itself.

Certain website builders combine Web development with Web hosting to offer complete Website creation packages. Read the section on Hosted vs. Self-hosted Websites for more information.

Web hosting companies offer different hosting packages to cater for different website requirements. Important considerations regarding Web hosting are:

  • Server resources (i.e. memory, processor speed, dedicated server, VPS, shared server)
  • Bandwidth
  • Connection speed
  • Location
  • Up-time
  • Support

In general, you should opt to pay a bit more for quality support and up-time guarantees because these will help to ensure that your blog or website doesn’t suffer from down-time.

Servers

In general, a Web host will put many websites and blogs onto a single server – shared hosting. This is what happens with low cost hosting packages (usually a few dollars per month).

The server shares its resources to serve webpages from all of these sites. This provides a cost effective solution for hosting many websites at once, but leaves each website with limited resources and susceptible to problems experiences by other websites on the same server.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) provides a better solution by dividing up the server into non-negotiable chunks. This guarantees each website a certain amount of the server’s resources and provides a far more reliable and robust hosting solution for only a small increase in cost – usually a few tens of dollars a month.

Dedicated servers, as the name implies, are dedicated to a single website. The entire server – with all it’s memory, CPU, etc – serve one site.

This provides greater resources to serve busier or more popular sites, but also incurs higher costs – sometimes several hundred dollars per month.

Often, high quality Web hosts will offer managed dedicated servers. Managed servers are monitored by the Web hosting company so that website owners don’t have to worry about software upgrades and other server maintenance issues.

Hosted vs. Self hosted Websites

Building a website and learning how to operate it via a Web host is quite a challenge because there are two distinct technologies to learn – web development, and hosting.

To reduce this burden, many website builders, eCommerce software solutions, and blogging sites provide hosting services with their websites. This allows you to design and develop a website online and have it hosted for you – hence the term hosted website.

This is different from a self-hosted website, which requires you to find a Web hosting service and deploy your website to it.

Self hosted websites offer more control, but hosted websites are much quicker and easier to use. In addition, hosted websites can take advantage of the latest technologies with no extra effort on your part – because there is generally a team of people working constantly to improve the service.

More Web hosting definitions

The above definitions consitute the major aspects of getting a website online.

However, there are plenty of other Web hosting and technology terms that you are likely to hear, so this list provides a quick look at some of the more common ones.

Up-time

Many hosting services will provide up-time guarantees. In essence they are saying that they are reliable, and that your website won’t be unavailable as a result of their servers or Internet connection going down.

cPanel or Plesk

A Web server needs an administration panel to expose the functionality of the software on that server in an easy-to-understand way. cPanel is the best, most full-featured server administration panel but it usually drives hosting costs up slightly.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth refers to how much data your website or blog is allowed to transfer on a monthly basis. Beware of gimmicky hosting packages that offer unlimited bandwidth for only a few dollars a month.

These services do technically offer unlimited bandwidth, but at low speed. This means that the actual speed of transfer is the limiting factor – as opposed to a cap on the bandwidth itself.

In effect, you may end up with a low speed website, which is bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Choose the right Web solution

To help you to find exactly the Website and Web hosting package that meets your needs (both in terms of technical requirements and cost), SEO Entrepreneur has put together a completely free Web solutions page.

It takes a few seconds to select options from 5 major categories:

  1. Website type
  2. Hosting & domains
  3. Web experience level
  4. Estimated traffic
  5. Monthly cost

This will instantly return the best quality and best value Web development and hosting packages that meet your requirements perfectly.

Learn more about Web hosting and development

In addition, if you’d like to learn more about building a website, domains, servers and hosting packages, I recommend you read the following articles:

Are you thinking of starting a website or blog? What problems have you encountered in setting up a Website? Share your Web development and hosting experiences and advice in the comments, or join me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to continue the conversation.