Five-Minute Guide to Web Hosting For Newbies

Proficient webmasters can effortlessly setup a new website in minutes with one of their immediate hosting companies. Unskilled webmasters are often confounded by the various web hosting plans, such as - affordable web hosting, Cheap Web hosting, ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting, Hosting With Templates, Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Shared Hosting, Unix / Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Windows Hosting and Co-location Hosting.

There's really a few things to look at while choosing a web hosting plan, whether you make a hobby site, a small business site, or a high-traffic ecommerce site. In fact, all web hosting plans and technical words can be classified in terms of cost, programming languages, operation systems, Web servers and functionality.

Cost of web hosting is the first thing that many small site owners are searching for. Most of web hosting plans cost less than $10 a month. Reasonable web hosting, budget hosting, or cheap web hosting plans often cost less than $5 per month.

Programming Languages

Whether you are going to write your own scripts or install customized software packages, you want to choose the hosting plans that support the programming languages of your choice. The commonly used Web development languages contain PHP, ASP, JSP and PERL. The hosting plans that support those programming languages are referred to as PHP Web hosting, ASP Web hosting, JSP Web hosting or PERL Web hosting. Almost all hosting companies support PHP/MySQL, but only a fraction of them support ASP or JSP. For newbies, PHP/MySQL is the choice for programming language.

Operating Systems

Once you've picked up the programming language(s) for your Web development, you still have freedom to select the operating system that hosts your Websites. Besides ASP which works only on Microsoft Windows, other programming languages, PHP, JSP and PERL, work on Windows, Unix and Linux. Hosting plans that support particular operating systems are referred to as Window Hosting, Unix Hosting or Linux hosting.

Servers

Apache is the most broadly supported Web server in the Web hosting industry. One of the enjoyable characteristics of Apache server is the ability of mod_rewrite to make dynamic URL look like static URL or SEO-friendly, among other things. ASP works only on Mirosoft Internet Information Server or IIS server. Weblogic or Websphere is needed for JSP hosting.

Performance

When webmasters are conferring with each other Web servers, they're most interested in the server performance - Managed Web Hosting, Shared Hosting, Dedicated Servers, or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Shared hosting is the most economical plan, and you can host as many sites as you like with a Reseller Hosting option. VPS costs around $50 a month, and a Dedicated Server plan will cost from $50 - $100 or more a month dependent on storage space and bandwidth of the hosting plan.

A shared hosting plan is good enough for most of websites. If your website serves contain heavy audio/video files, or needs to often install customized software package, you'll need a dedicated server. For example, a company that sells Computer Based Training (CBT) software online upgraded its hosting plan from a shared hosting to a dedicated hosting plan in the first six months of online operation as the company started to use video/audio support to boost online sales.

Online Transaction Support

Websites that accept payment online, require support of secure connection (HTTPS) and digital certification to run online transaction safely. Another option of having your own online merchant account is to use a third party payment processor for payment process. Integration of PayPal shopping cart only takes about a few minutes without any need in competence of programming skills.

After all, choosing a web hosting plan that works for you isn't that complex, even for the inexperienced persons.