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Website Hosting

If you want to take part in the internet as a business, information resource, directory, or as a hobbyist wanting to share data, information and knowledge with the many people and communities on the internet, you have to contain this in a central spot on the internet. You have to own a piece of space in cyberspace.

Web hosting empowers you and anyone with a computer and internet connection to own a piece of cyberspace. In your space, you can have news, bulletins, documents, data, files (your web site) and your own post office (mail server) to accept mail, all in the context of you or your business.

In our modern society, for every person in business or with a career in most industries today, it is imperative to have a place in cyberspace, not just to be competitive but to survive. Web hosting companies were born out of this great need to provide an environment for the masses to own a piece of cyberspace, to offer an environment where people could have their piece of cyberspace on the internet 24/7 without the great cost. Web hosting companies developed a model where they could split up areas on the servers connected to the backbone and 'rent' this space, cutting the costs across many people sharing the server and backbone connection to the internet.

To obtain space in a web hosting environment you become a member and agree to terms and conditions of renting the space - just as if you were to rent a house or commercial premise for your business. Once you agree and become a member, you are given an access code, a key, to your piece of cyberspace. This key, in the form of a login and password, allows you to connect to the web hosting server and upload (transfer to) your web site so it can be accessed on the internet. Your login and password is also used to connect to a server to create and administer mailboxes to send and receive email for you, your staff, or family members.

The similarity of renting an office or home to renting space in a web-hosting environment is even more similar. With some buildings a gardener and/or a guard is available to look after the gardening or provide security. In a web-hosting environment, you have support people to help you do what you need to do on your web site to make it grow and there are server administrators to protect and secure your web-hosting space.

Windows or Linux Hosting, Which Is Right For You?

If you are a new or casual Webmaster and your site is non-revenue generating with static HTML pages you generated from boxed software, then Linux is the best solution overall for you because linux hosting costs less and you hardly ever need to research into the more advanced functions. Server operating system becomes a non-issue. All you need to do is to have a good host.

The moment you decide you want your site to have more complex features like members only area, e-commerce, live help and so on, then the server operating system might be important. Interactive features rely on server side programs that process your site visitor's input and return something intelligent. There are many programs out there but most common are ASP, PHP and Perl.

Windows Desktop and Server Operating System

Just because you run a windows desktop does not mean you must opt for Windows web hosting. Whatever operating system you use on your desktop has little to do with your choice of hosts. As long as you understand your FTP or web publishing software, your host can be any operating system.

Website Objectives

What is important however is you know what you want your site to do (what you want to offer on your web site). This is what will ultimately lead you to the type of hosting. As mentioned before, interactive sites usually rely on ASP, PHP or Perl type languages. Each programming language has its own strengths and weaknesses and sometimes one can give you something the other can't, although not very often. PHP and Perl are Linux based and ASP Windows.

If you opt to use ASP to power your web site, then you will want to go with Windows hosting. You might be told that ASP is available on Linux hosting packages and that is true. But bear in mind it might not work as well on Linux as they would on Windows. This is also true the other way around. While you can have PHP or Perl on a Windows web host, they were not developed for Windows and might not work as well. In fact, there are often disclaimers about using these languages on Windows servers.

Some hosts have successfully implemented these programming languages for the different platforms. Be very clear in this case about the scripts you want to use because server configurations for Windows can be vastly different from Linux. This might cause the script to fail or not function at it's full potential. It's always best to go with the operating system the language was built for.

Security

You have most likely been told Unix based servers have better security. Mainly because these operating systems have consistently been reliable while Windows is a big target for exploitation. Hosting-wise it boils down to one thing, no matter how secure the operating system is, your site cannot be secure if your host has not configured it correctly and isn't updated often or swiftly.

In speed and performance they both perform well. Hardware is a big factor here. Again, look to your host. Do they upgrade well ahead or do they max out the resources before doing so?