Website hosting is a service that is provided by a hosting company. These companies have space within office buildings with sometimes hundreds of servers. These are called server farms and on these servers websites are hosted. The buildings include high security, air conditioning, backup generators, high speed internet connections and 24 hours support.
There are lots of different types of hosting available. These include dedicated web hosting, shared hosting, blog hosting, and video hosting to name but a few.
Dedicated web hosting is where you have an allocation of an entire server to yourself which gives you more control of it, such as re-starting on demand. It also allows you to put substantial more information on the website, virtually as much as you like. This is however very expensive and not for the average business.
Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting and which virtually all small and medium business choose. It allows an affordable space to place your website however you are sharing the server with many other businesses. This is normally fine for most businesses. Security is good as you can only make changes to your allocation of the server and no one else's. Speed is generally ok unless the server is in high demand in which case a cheap lower quality hosting service can provide very slow loading times.
Blog and video hosting are very popular these days particularly the former. This is free and suitable for personal websites or blogs and not suitable for business. There are a number of popular free blog sites including MySpace, Blogger and others. They are all very easy to use but again not really suitable for business.
Video hosting sites such as YouTube are extremely popular. Again another free service, videos can be uploaded by anyone. Millions of people visit these sites regularly. Video hosting is not real y for business abut your website can link to videos which can be hosted on YouTube.
