While searching, i just typed web hosting on Ebay and viola; there were loads and loads of “cheap” web hosting companies out there. I obviously was happy and was very eager to get my site up and running and hence immidiately paid the money and got my account setup and believe me; that was end of all the happiness. Then after that, i faced a lot of problems like frequent downtimes from 6 hours to 4 days to my site getting hacked and defaced by hackers and many such problems.

So, here are a couple of reasons why you shouldnt be buying a web hosting from a cheap web hosting provider.

• Frequent Downtimes: When i was hosting my site(not this one) i had many downtimes that ranged from a couple of hours to a couple of days. The worst part is i had adwords ads pointing towards the site and people would click on the ads and my site was down. So, i would lose money and even potential new readers for the site.
• Lesser amount of security: Security is another problem with these cheap hosting sites that you find on Ebay or some of the forums. I remember my website being hacked and defaced as many as 3 times in a month and good thing that i had backup of everything and i could bring my site up. But, that might not be the case always especially where there is user generated content.
• No Traffic management or Load management: Now, as you might know, shared web hosting involves sharing of server resources with a number of users or websites. However, sharing of server resources has to have a limit. Most of these cheap web hosting companies try and smack as many people as they can on a single server( in most cases they have a single server) and there is no load or traffic management as the professional web hosting providers have it!

So, these are some of the reasons why i refrain from buying cheap web hosting from companies that you find on ebay or other forums who offer to provide a years web hosting for less than 5$. So, believe me some more money paid to a web hosting company can lead to a lot of mental stress being taken away from you; however, you must also beware of those web hosting companies that charge exhorbitant prices per month in the wake of exclusivity!!

Now, open source software come in all sizes and shapes right from the simple wordpress; which is a blogging platform on which this blog is based or to the most complex open source softwares based on which you can build entire social networking sites.

So, the spectrum of open source softwares or the open source scripts is large and hence you can understand that the web hosting requirements of the open source software is also very large. Hence, we have to consider the open source software into account before making any generalized conclusions.

Having written the above paragraph it is a known fact that the requirements of most open source softwares or scripts are not much and usually come under the shared hosting plans that most web hosting companies give. Most of the open source softwares are either PHP based and a few of them are PERL or CGI based. PHP is offered by any Linux based web hosting plan.  Also, PERL and CGI as well as these days Ruby or Rails(RoR) is also offered by many web hosting companies in their standard shared hosting plans.

Although most open source softwares will be installed in many standard plans you need to take care of the following things before installing or upgrading your open source software.

1. Version: Many open source softwares work on specific versions of PHP(most of the times the latest versions). However, since open source software especially one with active developement like the PHP releases newer versions very often. Hence most web hosting companies will not upgrade to the latest version of PHP as fast and will wait until the latest version of PHP is stable and bug free. Hence, make sure the version compatibility when you install a new open source script or software or even upgrade your exsisting open source software.
2. Restrictions by web hosting companies: some web hosting companies put restrictions on the features of the server or even features of the programming language that you can use. This is done keeping in mind the security  of the server and effective management of server resources and load balancing.You should take care of this aspect as well when installing any open source script or software. If your open source software requires any such special features it is better to go for a dedicated hosting package.
3. Libraries: Many open source softwares will require specific libraries which are not included in the standard web hosting packages provided by web hosting companies;so beware of what libraries are included in your web hosting package.
4. Databases: Make sure the database that your open source software is based on is available with your web hosting plan. Because, if you install the open source software and then you realize that the database is not supported then its a waste of time.

Hence, the above things are very essential to be taken care of while installing a open source script or open source software although most popular open source softwares are compatible with most popular web hosting plans!!!

Now, to start a website, there are several things that are required; some of them are as listed below along with the problems that you might face if you are planning to host your website at home.

1. Server Software: Now, there are several server operating systems, but most of the server operating systems are either Linux based or Windows Based. For a Windows Based operating system, you of course have the licensing costs where as in Linux based operating system you have the maintenence costs. If you are good with computers and installation and updation of the softwares then these costs can be saved; although they will take so much of your time that you wont have time to do anything else with your website.
2. Server Hardware: If you are planning to have  a professional always available website then you need to have good and efficient server with enough processing power and memory. Along with processing power and momory you will need redundant storage usually with arrays of disks(RAID levels) along with redundant network access devices so that if at all a device fails the access to your server wont fail. So, what you need is a full fledged web server. Now, web server hardware can come anywhere between $800 to thousands of dollars depending upon your requirements.
3. Software costs: Apart from the server operating system there are several software costs like database licenses( if you use MS-SQL or Oracle or Enterprise MySQL), developement environment licenses(like Visual Studio etc) and much more.
4. Personnel: Installation and upgradation of all the above services need expertise. If you are planning to do all the installation and upgradation on your own then it will take almost all of your time and hence you wont be able to do anything else. And website creation and maintenence has a lot of things hence you will also have to bear the costs of hiring people.

But like the above disadvantages or pitfalls, there are also some advantages of hosting a website at home. The main advantage of hosting a website at home is scaling, which means you can increase and decrease the bandwidth, the storage required to host your website and loads of other things more easily and relatively cheaply as compared to hosting companies. But i think these days most of the hosting companies are pretty accomodative and you can change hosting plans very easily and you can upgrade and downgrade very easily as well. So i think you will have to decide if it is feasible for you to host a website from home.

I personally suggest a web hosting company primararily because of their webhosting experience as well as the amount of expertise and the professionalism that these web hosting companies have. so, if you are serious about having a website or an online business, web hosting companies are your best bet.

A dedicated web hosting can enable you to have a website which requires loads and loads of storage space or loads and loads of bandwidth. A dedicated web hosting usually comes with a dedicated IP address and hence you can have you dedicated hosting server used as a update server which can be used to update any software that you have distributed to your clients.

Ofcourse, in a dedicated hosting environment, you can have webpages or dynamic websites based on any script including Java, cold fusion to mASP.NET and PHP. You can have any operating systems that you want, provided you have license to these operating systems. Many times, dedicated hosting plans come pre-installed with an operating system.

All the control of the web server in dedicated hosting is done remotely using a Remote administration tools. You can use this tools to reboot the server, install uninstall softwares, perform various security checks and audits and loads of other things. You can also add/remove storage disks or memory to and from the server based on your requirements. The web hosting company usually does this for you since the server is at the web hosting companies location.

Ofcourse, there are some disadvantages with dedicated hosting, the main one compared to the pricing of the dedicated hosting plans. Dedicated web hosting tends to be costly as compared to shared or virtual private web hosting so you need to analyze your needs before you select upon a dedicated hosting company and a dedicated hosting server. Other area of concern is the management of the dedicated web server.  Many times the web hosting companies manage the webserver with some extra cost or sometimes due to the cometitiveness of the web hosting market the management of the dedicated web server is included in the web hosting plan.

These are some of the things that should be kept in mind before buying a dedicated web hosting plan. Remember, a dedicated web hosting plan is a major investment and hence you need to be careful before buying a dedicated web hosting plan.

A virtual private web hosting gives the customer a view that his website is the only website running on a web server while actually the web server is shared among several other websites like in Shared Web Hosting. But the major difference between a shared web hosting and a virtual private web hosting is that each user in a VPS has his own operating system and he can use it which ever way he wants( ofcourse with some restrictions from the web hosting company from a security point of view). But in general, a virtual web hosting customer can install softwares on his virtual private server or reboot the virtual operating systems and much more.

Given below are some of the advantages of Virtual Private Server:

• Freedom: Although virtual private server shares its resources with other users it gives the user a feeling that he is the only user of the web server. This is mainly due to the virtual environment of the server and the operating system installed on that environment. This gives the user a lot of freedom and he can do whatever he wishes to do with his virtual server. He can do anything from rebooting to reinstalling operating system, installing/uninstalling software and a whole lot of things. However, theoritically the user can install any software he wants; practically it has been known that softwares like Firewalls, anti-virus packages etc dont work well on virtual environments.
• Dedicated Processing speed and RAM: In a shared web hosting, the processing speed and RAM depends on the load of other websites hosted on the server along with your website. In a Virtual Web hosting plan, there is a fixed amount of processing speed and Memory(RAM) of the processor resources dedicated to your hosting account. This is more important if you have a high computation or high memory usage software installed on your virtual operating system or a high requirement website.
• Dedicated Bandwidth as well: A virtual private web hosting account usually has a dedicated bandwidth for each account. This gives reliability with the availability of your site and the number of concurrent connections that your site can handle.
• Flexibility: You can virtually install any software on your virtual private server. This means if you have a website coded in a language that is not installed on your server, you can very well install its interpreter on your server and get going. The best example of this is the use of PHP on a windows machine or the use of Apache on a windows machine.

There are certain disadvantages of Virtual web servers as well. They are:

• Although theoritically we can install any software in a VPS, firewalls and anti virus clients are known to not work properly on a Virtual Environment. So, you have to keep in mind the various requirements of your code and your website before purchasing a virtual web hosting package.
• Managed/ UnManaged: In a managed virtual web hosting package, you have to monitor and manage your website or hire someone to do that. There are several tools and softwares provided to manage virtual web hosts. In an managed virtual web hosting package the Virtual web server is not managed.
• Price: The price of Virtual Private web hosting is considerably higher than that of shared hosting. That is understood as well with the freedom and flexibility that it provides over shared hosting. So, you have to take this point into account as well before selecting a VPS Plan.

Virtual Web hosting is used in several applications including specialized torrents trackers, to creating a sandbox environments to test newer scripts on a web server before making it public to various other applications.

Let us consider some of the advantages of shared web hosting:

1. Cheaper: Shared web hosting is a lot cheaper as compared to dedicated web hosting or Virtual private web hosting. It is cheaper because of the fact that all the costs to maintain all the resources and the web server are shared among several websites or customers and hence the cost is less. Shared web hosting can start at as cheap as $10 per month. Hostgator.com currently offers very good shared web hosting plans starting from as low as $4.95.
2. Managed: In shared web hosting, you dont have to worry about managing the web server, managing about the security of the web server as well as updating the softwares and database packages. This releases a great deal of workload and hence you can concentrate on your website rather than these things.

Ofcourse there are several disadvantages to shared web hosting as well.

1. Lack of Control: You have less amount of control on the web server. What if you want have a library on which your entire website is based and your hosting provider doesnt have that library installed? Ofcourse you can request your hosting provider to install that library; but your web site hosting provider won’t always accomodate your requests  because he has to think about others who are sharing the web server with you.
2. SSL Implementation: SSL implementation is a problem when it comes to shared hosting. SSL implementation is used for the Secure socket layer and is usually used for payments or transferring sensitive information over the internet. The SSL certificates are installed per server/IP address and hence since there are several domains installed on the web server it can be a problem. Many web hosting companies make you buy a dedicated IP address if you need to install your SSL certificate and a dedicated IP address can cost you anywhere between $10 per year to $35 per year.

Shared hosting is best suited if you want to keep your hosting costs down and dont require any advanced features or extra ordinary storage or bandwidth requirements. It is best suited for most websites that you find on the internet.

Hostgator.com currently offers excellent Shared web hosting starting from $4.95. They provide a lot of additional features and language options both on the Linux platform and the Windows Platform. The most notable feature being the uptime guarantee which is 99.9% and the 45 day money back guarantee. Hence, I recommend HostGator.com if you are planning to buy a shared hosting package.

Godaddy.com offers very good windows based web hosting on a powerful infrastructure. They have Windows hosting plans from as low as $4.08 per month and if you sign up for an entire year then it is even lower at $3.85 per month; which saves you a good 10% at Godaddy.com along with several features.

There are several advantages of Windows Based Web Hosting. Some of the advantages are listed below.

1. Known Environment: As I said earlier, we have been using Windows on our home computers for years. Hence, we know the Windows based environment, the windows filesystem( filesystem means the way we have files arranged on our computer in drive:folders\file format in windows). The windows based web hosting also has the same file system and hence we dont have to learn new concepts from scratch. You wont feel the important of this point if you are using shared hosting, however this point is of more importance if you are using dedicated web hosting and you have to manage your dedicated web hosting account on your own from a remote location.
2. .NET Framework: I believe the .net framework and everything that comes with it, the development environment Visual Studio and several other tools is the greatest Microsoft product after Windows; And with Windows based web hosting you get to leverage this enormous power of .net in your web applications. This will be especially be useful with Microsoft having a range of interesting products under .net in the form of Microsoft Silverlight( which is Microsofts competition to Adobe Flash) and the Windows Presentation Framework and the Windows Communication framework along with several others. You can build really cool Rich Internet Applications from using these. Ofcourse needless to say you can obviously use ASP and ASP.NET with Windows based web hosting which you cannot with linux based web hosting.
3. Use of both the Worlds: In this type of web hosting you can use all the programming and scripting languages in the windows environment like ASP,ASP.NET, the rich .net framework as well as several scripting languages in Linux world as well like PHP,Python and Perl. The same is applicable with databases, you can use Microsofts SQL and MySQL both on the same pc and the same time. This means that you can have one website that uses asp.net and MS-SQL and another that uses PHP and MySQL. This is the unique advantage of Windows based web hosting. This cannot be accomplished in Linux based web hosting.

Windows based web hosting although very beneficial has its own concerns as well. The Windows based web hosting has the following concerns:

1. Licensing costs: Windows based web hosting are usually costly as compared to Linux web hosting. This is because Windows unlike Linux is not free and has its own costs and annual licenses. This costs are passed on to you the consumer by the web hosting company. Hence Windows web hosting is relatively costly.
2. Control Panel: Linux based web hosting has a defacto control panel standard cpanel, there are several control panels in use to manage windows based web hosting. This is essentially important if you want to transfer your website from one web host to another and both the web hosts have different control panels. Care should be taken that there are no compatibility issues with respect to control panels.

These are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Windows based web hosting. The above factors should be taken into consideration when planning to buy a windows based web hosting package. As i mentioned above Godaddy.com offers excellent windows web hosting for as low as $3.85 per month.

Some of the advantages of the Linux based web hosting are:

1. Cheaper: A linux based web hosting plan is always cheaper than the Windows based web hosting plan. The reason that a Linux based web hosting plan is cheaper is because the Linux in itself is a free operating system and so are various distributions of Linux. Hence, the web hosting company does not have to spend money buying the operating system or on licensing cost and the web hosting company transfers this savings in cost on the users that is you. Hence, the Linux based operating systems are cheaper.
2. Support for PHP/MySQL: PHP/MySQL is the most popular server side scripting language and database combination. It is very easy to create  dynamic web site using PHP/MySQL and more over since these are also freely available there is ample support for both of them from the open source community. How is this support helpful to you? there are thousands of code samples and forums that discuss PHP and MySQL which makes coding simpler.
3. Embrace open standards: Linux, as an operating system in itself is open in nature and hence Linux based web hosting plans support many other open standards or platforms or open programming languages. Hence you can use programming languages like PERL or Python in Linux based web hosting plans. You can also use CGI in these plans if you are a fan of cgi although cgi is largely outdated these days.
4. Standardized Control Panel: Most Linux based web hosting plans have cpanel as a control panel. This control panel is not standardized but it can be called as a defacto standard as it is most commonly used. The main advantage of this is that since the control panel is standardized you will find it easier if you move from a web hosting company to other or if you want to move your web hosting account to other web hosting company. There will not be any compatibility issues.

Although above factors might make you think that linux based web hosting is the only thing you need to know, linux based web hosting might be difficult to manage if you have a dedicated unmanged linux based web hosting package. One more disadvantage of Linux based web hosting is that you wont be able to use any of the Microsoft technologies like ASP/ASP.NET and the .net framework in your website. Although there are alternatives for everything, .net technologies might be a important factor to consider.Having said above, if you are content with PHP/Python/perl and believe me these languages have libraries for just about everything then Linux based web hosting is best for you.

Now, there are several types of web hosting that are provided by several web hosting companies. These several types of web hosting are either based on the type of operating system( Linux or Windows) used on the web server and also the resources and how they are shared among several web hosting accounts!

Based on the operating system used on a web server there are two types of web hosting:

1. Linux based Web Hosting: A Linux based web hosting uses a Linux based operating system on the web server. The main advantage of the linux based web hosting is the fact that Linux( and its variants) are freely available. So, the operating system costs to the web hosting company is minimal and the web hosting companies usually pass on these minimum costs to you, the user. Hence, Linux based web hosting is cheaper as compared to its counterpart, the Windows Based Web hosting.
2. Windows Based web hosting: In windows based web hosting, the operating system used on the web server is a Microsoft Windows Server operating system most often Microsoft Windows 2003 Server or Microsoft Windows 2008 Server. The best part about Windows based web hosting is that it can use programming languages like ASP,ASP.NET and PHP, python as well where as in Linux based web hosting it is not possible to use ASP,ASP.NET.

The other major sector by which web hosting can be distingwished is how the resources are divided between the different web sites or between the different web hosting accounts.

1. Shared Web Hosting: In this type of web hosting, all the resources of a web server like the disk space, the memory (i.e RAM) as well as the bandwidth is shared among several users/ several websites. Now, web servers usually have immense amount of the above resources and hence if your website is the “typical” website then it wont really make any difference if these resources are shared with others. The benefit that the sharing of these resources is that the prices are reduced to a great extend. Shared hosting plans usually start from around 3$ to upto 8$ per month for most companies.
2. Virtual Private hosting: In virtual private hosting just like shared hosting the resources of a web server are shared among several users. However, virtual private hosting gives a view to the user that his website is the only website hosted on a web server. Some of the features that virtual private hosting gives which shared hosting does not is the access to the root of the server as well as the ability to reboot the server operating system. In virtual private hosting each web hosting account/website is given a separate operating system and you can install various software on it just like you do on your home computer.
3. Dedicated Web hosting: In dedicated web hosting, the entire web server is yours; just that it is at a different location than yours. In dedicated web hosting, you can have as many websites as you want, you can install the OS and re-install it, you can install and uninstall various softwares. It is your computer at a remote location. Dedicated web hosting is usually used for specific purposes and for high bandwidth websites. There are two types of dedicated web hosting plans:
   1. Managed Dedicated Hosting: In managed dedicated hosting, the web server is managed by a person who is a trained network/system administrator of the web hosting company onsite. This person usually has the required skill and expertise in handling web servers and hence this type of web hosting although a little more expensive prove to be very reliable.
   2. UnManaged Dedicated Hosting: In Unmanaged dedicated web hosting, you or an administrator/system expert from your company has to administer the web server remotely using Remote login.

This article focuses on the basics of web hosting and there are many more types of web hosting which i will be covering in subsequent posts.

HostingStud.com is a site; rather a blog to make people know everything that they need to know before buying a website hosting service or a webhosting package. HostingStud.com will contain information about the very basics of web hosting, right from “what is web hosting?” to the  more advanced topics like Shared hosting, virtual hosting or virtual private hosting, dedicated hosting and reseller hosting.

Why HostingStud.com?

I have been a freelance programmer for a very long time now and over the years people have continiously asked me about web hosting and have taken advice from me; and some of those questions were the very basic ones and others from professionals who have been there done that but unsure of the webhosting package to select. I have also over the years have researched web hosting and various website hosting companies and have on sites hosting on several web hosting companies and services. Hence this web hosting blog.

What topics will HostingStud.com cover?

HostingStud.com will primararily contain anything and everthing that is related to website hosting including various types of web hosting, to web hosting for specific programming languages, to web hosting for specific platforms and much more. The site will also contain tutorials and tips about configurations of various services provided by web hosting providers and companies. HostingStud.com will also concentrate on periodic reviews of various web hosting providers and their web site hosting plans.

This and much more is planned for this site and i hope I deliver on the above things. So, keep checking this site and do subscribe to our site so that you guys can check the updates as soon as i post them.