There’s one thing other than web traffic that your website can’t do without and that thing is called Web Hosting You are about to read everything you need to know about web hosting.

Web hosting is actually your website’s home on the internet, and to be more specific everything we see online, every website, blog, image is hosted somewhere. There are many web hosting services, these services basically offer us their servers to host the content of our websites.

What is a server?

A server is a computer just like the one you have at home. That computer is constantly connected to the internet and provides data by request.

A good web hosting service should provide the following:

• Support - Whether you are new to web hosting, or you are an expert in your field, as long as the servers are out of your reach, you will need somebody to talk to in case of need. Most likely that you need 24/7 support since most of the web hosting services are international so they need to provide support to all parts of the world.
• As little limitation as possible – Even though it’s unlikely you reach your storage limits or bandwidth limit (data amount transferred to and from your website), you should not be limited or at least have high limitation. For example 2000 GB of bandwidth is something that you will not likely reach unless you provide streaming service or software downloads and such.
• No Downtime - One of the most annoying moments of being a webmaster is trying to access your own website unsuccessfully or being told by someone it is not available. I use web monitoring service to get real time alerts when my websites are down, this way i can get them up and running or contact someone to get them up and running as soon as possible.
• Low Price - This one goes without saying.
• Software Support – A good web hosting should support PHP and SQL databases as well as ASP and .Net, it should allow the most common web software and plugins (Did you know that DreamHost doesn’t allow the all in one seo plugin?)

There are 3 type of hosting services:

1. Shared Hosting – The cheapest and most common web hosting type. You are hosted on a server with other clients, each have its own resources and you basically share the same piece of hardware. This is a good option for beginners with low traffic websites and websites that don’t require a lot of memory and processing power.
2. Virtual Private Server Hosting - In this case you are still hosted on a server with other websites, but in this case you are allocated a fixed space and server power which is your own virtual private server. This option costs more than the shared hosting and is a bit more reliable than the shared hosting feature, furthermore you are guaranteed a certain server configuration which is good if you have more than just basic needs.
3. Dedicated Server - This is the highest level of web hosting. You rent a server which is your own private server with no other websites but yours. You can configure it anyway you want and host whatever you want on it. All the resources of this server is yours to use. Please note that there is managed dedicated hosting and un-managed dedicated hosting – the difference is the basic configuration and support which is done either by you (un-managed) or by the web hosting staff (managed). A dedicated server is the most expensive hosting option but also the most reliable one.

Blog Hosting – Blog (Web Blog) is the most common form of website on the internet. There are a few type of blog publishing platforms which are basically the platform of publishing for the webmaster, the most popular platform is called WordPress, Buy Traffic Guide also runs on such a platform. Since it’s the most popular publishing platform, many web hosting services adjusted themselves to offer the most user friendly and easy to use service for blog hosting and as such they offer one click install blogs which means you can install a blog on your domain name with just a single click.

If you have a recommendation for a good web hosting service tell us about it.