Website hosting explained

So what’s Hosting all about

It has become almost a necessity for any company that wants to make money to have business hosting. Not only does it help give off the impression of professionalism but there is so much money looking to be made online it would be silly to throw away this revenue stream. However, what is hosting all about? Let’s take a little look.

Firstly, you need to be aware of how the internet works. The internet is formed of a number of computers all networked together. You can access a computer on the other side of the world easily, as long as you know the IP address or domain name of that server. Each of these machines holds data, whether it is a website or data for a company. Therefore, if you want a website then you need to be on one of these machines.

Shared or Dedicated

When you purchase hosting you will be purchasing a ‘slot’ on one of these machines, or even a whole machine to yourself if you opt for dedicated hosting. You can then put your website on here which will allow anybody anywhere in the world to access it. You would need to purchase a domain name at the same time as your hosting to allow people to access the website.

Size doses matter

When you purchase hosting, there are two figures which will often be the most prominent. The first will be the amount of storage space that you have and the second will be the amount of bandwidth. In a few cases these may be listed as ‘unlimited’. The first number should be self-explanatory if you are familiar with computers, this basically means the amount of information that you are able to store on the web server. The second number takes a bit of explaining. Every time somebody accesses your website they will be looking at data. To put it in the simplest way possible, bandwidth is the amount of data accessed. For example, if they load a 1MB video then they will have consumed 1MB of bandwidth. If 100 people access the same video then 100MB of bandwidth would have been consumed. Therefore when you purchase hosting you need to bear in mind the amount of bandwidth that could potentially be consumed.

Speed and Power

That isn’t all about website hosting however. Often they will band about a number of features. For example the control panel which is used to access your website and the types of ‘services’ that you can run on the hosting. Whilst many of these features won’t be high priority for most of you, one that you need to be on the lookout for is whether PHP and SQL can be run on the server. This will allow you to run dynamic programs such as WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world.

This is just a brief overview of website hosting. However there is more than enough information here to help you choose the perfect UK Hosting for you and on that subject, The PurpleFruit team didn’t not looking to disappoint can now offer high speed, high quality UK business hosting. It is situated in a UK data centre with Tier 2 grade certification. This means that it is protected by main power failure with a diesel backup generator. The data centre is securely monitored 24/7 and the server is backed up nightly to another location.

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