Whether you have a humble blog about cats or a million-dollar business that needs a homepage, you’re going to need web hosting. At its most basic form, web hosting simply refers to the service that lets you put your content online; they provide the hardware and connection to the World Wide Web, you provide the words, pictures, video…whatever you want the world to see when they look for you.
If your needs are very minor, you may be able to make due with the services provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). When you originally decided to connect to the ‘net, you probably got a few megabytes of space on your ISP that you could use for whatever you wanted — a personal home page, usually. The same kind of page is often provided by employers on the company server or as your home base on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et cetera.
Great things have indeed come from such humble beginnings; for example, eBay began as a small personal website (but quickly outgrew its first set of virtual clothes…).
Plenty of free web hosting options exist to cover that kind of space and content requirement, and some go even further to begin to offer a more spacious and flexible environment. As a general rule of thumb, however, any (even slightly) serious web hosting requirement will most likely have to be paid for…one way or another.
Back in the caveman days of the Internet (say, ten years ago), a web hosting package nearly always involved more hands-on content management and supervision from the service. Now, most modern operating systems include server software, and the general user-friendliness and computer savvy of many users has risen to the point where web hosting is more hands-off. The web hosting companies today often provide only basic maintenance and detailed technical support (unless more involvement is contracted).
In later pages, we’ll examine the differences between types of web hosts and also different uses of web hosts.