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Web Hosting and How it Works

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Web Hosting

The web hosting industry is extremely cut throat. You’ll find some web hosting companies are trying to undercut their competitors to gain business.

A vast majority of web hosting customers are completely unaware of how the web industry operates or what’s involved. In this article, I am going to shine some light on the logistics of web hosting.

How web hosting works

When building your blog, you’ll contact your desired hosting provider and order the relevant hosting package.  Developing a blog in essence is a piece of virtual real estate. Think about it. When you build a house you need a plot of land, a unique address, and materials to build your house. A web hosting provider can be compared to real estate agents but for a virtual environment.

Once you’ve ordered your web hosting, your blog will be stored on a server located in a highly secure datacenter.

What is a datacentre?

A datacenter is the perfect environment for hosting your blog.  A datacenter is a huge computer room that contains hundreds of servers. The servers are contained in cabinets which make up isles. Think of a datacenter as a supermarket with many isles. In the supermarket, you have cool isles where all the chilled items are stored.

There are hundreds of servers within a datacenter, and these servers are running constantly. An entire room of servers operating will generate a lot of heat. It’s important to keep this environment cool. Throughout the datacenter, there are air conditioning units that are operating constantly.

To keep all those servers running constantly, it is important to have redundant systems in place. In the event of a power failure, it’s crucial to have these servers running immediately. Datacenters will have redundant air conditioning systems in place as well.

A datacenter also has a battery supply in place. This battery supply gives the datacenter engineers enough time to power up the backup diesel generators. Many diesel generators can be refueled whilst in operation. The outside world around the datacenter may have a major power failure, and the web servers would still be in operation.

Security and safety are very important. If a fire did break out, the fire suppression systems would eliminate any flames.

Have you ever noticed on web hosting sites there’s a benefit mentioning an “uptime guarantee 99%”?  When you purchase web hosting, you should look for a Service Level Agreement (SLA).  This states the level of service you’d expect from your hosting provider.

Why are some hosting packages cheap?

datacenter web hosting

Bearing in mind the expense of running a datacenter, it’s important to understand that you get what you pay for.

There are many types of web hosting, but let’s compare dedicated servers and shared hosting.  The shared hosting platform is the most common hosting package. Shared hosting is very affordable and a cheap way to host your blog. For many bloggers, shared hosting is ideal. If your blog has low traffic, it’s unlikely you’ll need a dedicated server.

Keep in mind, shared hosting can be slower because you’re sharing the server’s resources.

A dedicated server is a highly powerful physical server that’s unshared by any other users. Dedicated servers are ideal for high traffic blogs and eCommerce websites.

To summarize, when you purchase your web hosting, remember that you only get what you pay for. Look at the options that your hosting company offers. It’s also important to consider after-sales support. If you have a problem, can you get 24/7 telephone support?

Now it’s your turn

Do you have any interesting experiences to share about web hosting? We’d love to hear your comments.

About

James King does eMarketing for Intrahost. A UK based web hosting provider. James also blogs on several UK based blogs.

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{ 26 Responses }

  1. Salmenn Arick A/L Ravee says:
    Great post about hosting. I appreciate that you gave a situation for us to visualize the importance of runtime. Selecting a good hosting company is important. Most importantly, picking the correct plan is important. Anyways, thanks for the great post.
  2. Marks says:
    Nice information! Hosting is complicated stuff needs constant care and attention.
  3. Tech blog says:
    thanks for sharing such a great article keep it up
  4. Robert says:
    Any data center should ensure that they get efficient security and protection measures, in order to be the most favored server hosting provider.
  5. Harry Sehgal says:
    Thanks for the Post. It added knowledge to me.
  6. Mike says:
    Nice article and it is easy for laymen to understand different types of hosting such as shared hosting, dedicated hosting etc..... I agree with you that for many bloggers, shared hosting is usually enough and good to start with.
  7. abhilash says:
    it is a very informative article, lot of new material for learning. i think no hosting company give unlimited space and bandwidth. so if anyone give you service in very cheap, then there must be some limitation.
  8. Sunny Gupta says:
    Ya shared web-hosting hosting comes for as cheap as 1$ per month. For high Traffic blogs, best is to get a VPS or if Possible a Dedicated server.
  9. Karan says:
    Wow, thanks for such an informative piece of content... You could've highlighted some more aspects but your job is really commendable..
  10. Shiva says:
    Hi there James, Nicely summarized information about what really is webhosting and how it works. You know in my short span of blogging life (nearly 1 year), I have been through a lot of different web hosting companies, shared to dedicated and the one main thing that one needs to note before signing up for any of them is to read their reviews, although nowadays even the reviews in Google are spammed by the companies who create their own blogs and write positive reviews themselves for their own service. I think it will be better to consult with people who are already using the hosting before signing up, maybe catch anyone up in twitter or facebook. Thanks a lot for the post. Regards, Shiva
  11. Sandeep says:
    Hey James, Good informative post on web hosting & data centers... What you refer to as isles are actually racks where the servers are stored... I've been at a data centre and can say its a very chilly place to be in and you cannot last for long there.. And yes, you definitely get what you pay for from different web hosts.. I've learnt the hard way but it's always better to get hosting from a reputed and well known brand like hostgator from the first day of blogging. It takes away whole lot of issues & crap of dealing with a bad web host with dumb customer support..
  12. Saket Jajodia says:
    Thanks for sharing this great info, I really got to know about many things about hosting, the time I bought my hosting (from HostGator) I just show unlimited and 24/7 online support.. But in my nest renewal thinking to move from Shared to Dedicated. Thanks once again.. :) Best Wishes, Saket Jajodia SJbn.Co
  13. Jenny says:
    Hi James, I was always confused to pick a hosting for my blog. I am a non savvy person so what I can do is only googling around for the review and found this post through Google too. Thank you ~J
  14. Vijayraj Reddy says:
    Remember one thing, if the web hosting is very cheap or free never gp for it, you will face problems in future.... Also all web hosting company says unlimited bandwidth and space, but they limit iNodes (no. of files) and CPU usage (if u use more than 10%, your account is suspended)
  15. Harsh Agrawal says:
    Nice info James... Learned some thing new about datacentre..Specially Isles is a new term for me.. Well I would say evolution of webhosting for a normal blogger goes like this Free Hosting or Shared hosting >> VPS >>> Dedicated hosting >> Cloud hosting..!!
  16. Alex says:
    When choosing a web host I usually search to determine if they have any agreements that can give them the rights to suspend my websites out of the blue. I also try to find out how much does unlimited mean in their case, because I found myself in a peculiar situation where a hosting company took my website down after exceeding their unlimited traffic bandwidth. Except that, I try to find hosts that are near my target audience, so if I make a local website I try to find the closest hosting company I can (of course the above quality checks still apply).
  17. James Martell says:
    I had a chance to your the 1&1 data center in Germany. It was amazing to say the least. A fully secure sterile environment that look like something you would see in a sci-fi movie.
  18. Dennis Edell says:
    As Jan found out, the company behind it all is as important as anything else. I've been using shared hosting with Hostgator for years with no real hassles..they know what they're doing. ;-)
  19. Dana says:
    Yeah, it is true that "what you pay, what you get". Therefore we should not hestitate top spend more money as long as the services is better. Indeed, web hosting up time and speed are important factor to our blog's success.
  20. John Glover says:
    This is good information. I never knew how it all worked other than knowing it worked. I use hostgator and I love their service but you shed some light on why some services are cheaper than others.
  21. Mani Viswanathan says:
    Thanks for a detailed post on Web Hosting James. It added up to my knowledge about Data Centers.
  22. Majid Taheri says:
    Top article. webhosting is blackbox for me.but after read this article this blackbox is open.
  23. James - Intrahost says:
    Hi Jitendra, Thanks for the comment. Okay, I'll look into that one for you. I'll email you the details once I've finished the article. Thanks for commenting.
  24. Jan Husdal says:
    A good post. The major point here is that not all hosting companies are created equal and that you should do some background research, i.e. read user reviews of their features and such, before deciding on which hosting companies to use. Searching Twitter for "#XYZHOST" can also give you an idea of user experiences. The other day I was pleasantly surprised with my own host, BlueHost, and I wrote a post about it here, when I discovered that they had a new cPanel feature called "Site Backup and Restore", a feature that really saved my day, when I managed to screw up my site with a 500 error and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get it back. After hours of manual tweaking and php-ing and htaccess-ing I finally found that Restore feature, and in 5 seconds I was back up. Needless to say, any thoughts of ever switching from BlueHost disappeared instantly. To me that is now the most important feature a host should have.
    • James - Intrahost says:
      Hi Jan, Thanks for the comment. A backup feature is a good idea. A 500 error is usually something to do with a .htaccess page. The instant back-up feature can be a lifesaver.
  25. Jitendra Singh says:
    Very informative article on hosting. I would like you to write one more article on DNS relation with hosting, most of the time we usually got confused with nameservers.