The Main Elements of Web Hosting Services

This article will focus on the Web hosting basics from the business perspective.

Simply put, Web hosting companies provides individuals, businesses and organizations the ability to house, maintain and present Web pages to the Internet. Web hosting companies take on the role of providing the needed infrastructure so that everyone can publish to the Internet. This infrastructure can be quite complicated and costly.

Web hosting companies and Internet service providers perform two different functions. In order to gain access to the Internet an ISP would be required. However, if you want to add content to the Internet then you'll require a web hosting company. Often times your ISP will provide a certain amount of free hosting where you can publish a personal Web site. For a business Web site though, you'll want to find a company that specializes only in web hosting.

Serving Web pages is not quite as easy as it may sound. Web sites need to be operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. This puts an incredible amount of stress on both the people and the equipment that operate in a Web hosting environment.

There is a very large overhead involved with this industry. Top of the line computers are needed to keep up with the high demands that are placed on them. These expensive computers, also called Web servers, require a large amount of power and get extremely hot. Even more power is then needed to keep the servers cold. Special facilities, with a controlled environment that is kept clean and cool, are a must for the serious Web hosting company. Many top end companies use dedicated air conditioning units to pump in cold air. Also, a decent Web host will have industrial strength generators in case of an emergency.

Web hosts also need to connect their datacenter to a backbone provider. Backbone providers, which are also called network service providers, allow the hosting company to have access to the high speed Internet trunk lines. This network access is sold by bandwidth. A Web host will buy a certain amount of bandwidth in order to sell to their customers. The definition of bandwidth is volume of information transmitted across a given communications line in a specific period of time.

The back-end structure of the Web hosting business is rather complicated. To balance the high operational costs Web hosting companies deal in volume. Web servers can present 1000's of Web sites per server. Adding everything up, there is a specific amount of money required to maintain a constantly running Web server. So each new site added to a server will decrease the overall cost per customer.

But, hosting too many Web sites on one server will start to decrease the speed and performance of the sites hosted on it. Then customers will experience the speed of their Web sites begin to slow down and might start to see general page errors when trying to load their site. A Web hosting company must maintain a balance between the performance of the server and the high operational costs involved.

Additionally, the fact that Web hosting is a 24/7 business means that the human overhead costs are above a normal business. There must be staff on location at all times. Instead of just one 8 hour shift there are three 8 hour shifts. Weekends must be covered too. Usually though, off hours staff are there in a technical support capacity only.

In conclusion, the Web hosting business has many components including hardware, software, network technologies and human hard work. This synergy of man and machine makes the Internet what it is today.

Jack Parker worked at one of the leading Web hosting providers for over 5 years. Now, instantly see the best Web Hosting Services available.