Website Hosting

Web hosts, in essence, are service providers that place your website on a computer which already is connected to the Internet. This in turn gives audiences or Internet surfers an opportunity to access your website. In fact, any website hosting service is just like a pc or a computer connected to the Internet. The only striking difference is that these web host services "serve up" numerous websites and hence as they're named as "server". 

With a very high speed Internet connection, web hosting services actually provide you space on the world wide web. Companies that host thousands of websites generally own a datacenter, which is a huge network of servers connected to the Internet. Owning a datacenter is very expensive and very few of them are owned by large web hosting services. Even some top web hosts rent space from datacenters and sell to service providers on their company's name. 

Choosing Website Hosting Services

Irrespective of innumerable and different plans, all website hosts provide various common features. You must check out these features while availing their services.

Diskspace

HTML webpages are very small ranging between 40 to 50 KB only and you can store lots of pages. Generally, images, videos take up more space but unless your website is not something very huge, a diskspace of 20MB is more than enough. These days, this is not a major issues as every service provider gives options of immense diskspace.

Bandwidth

It is generally defined as the monthly limits on the amount of data that is transferred to the person looking at your website from the web server that hosts your website on the Internet. Indirectly, bandwidth is the measure of your web traffic. Higher the web traffic on your website, more will be your bandwidth requirements.

Email Accounts

The number of email accounts you need to use for the services of the web host. Generally, you don't require many mails. 

Customer Support

This is a very important feature. Do you want email support or telephonic support? Unless you're not a huge website company, this feature is not required. Remember, every feature you avail, you have to pay for it.

Type of Server

This is a very technical aspect and depending on your needs and website usage, Linux or Windows 2000 will do the job. 

Other Features

There are many features offered by web hosting services. Unless you're not someone who owns a website with tremendous web traffic, it's not required to go into much details. If you desire for small business web hosting you don't require to know about very deep technical intricacies.

Top 10 Best Website Hosting Services

Here is a list of top 10 website hosting services with their pricing (approximate). Almost all of these services offer money back guarantee, although, their duration may vary. To know more about the plans of these services, visit their websites and get all the information in detail.

• Yahoo Web Hosting: US$8
• Green Geeks Hosting: US$7
• SuperGreen: US$6
• Bluehost: US$7
• HostClear: US$4
• FatCow Green Hosting: US$4
• iPage: US$4
• JustHost: US$4
• InMotion: US$6
• HostMonster: US$4

Free Website Hosting

With growth in the web world, free website hosting services have become a possibility. There are numerous free web hosting services in the market that offer their services although with some limitations. Two of the unique features of free hosting services are that they either offer asubdomain or a directory. By availing facilities of various service providers that offer free web hosting accounts, one can launch their small websites. Numerous free accounts allow you to use your domain name (technically called as free virtual hosting) while some others club your website address as a subdomain of their free hosting company (for example, www.nameofyoursite.freehosting.com). This is known as free subdomain hosting. Free website hosting is generally meant for very small websites that have the least potential to grow. In case, you don't care much about the growth of your small website, you don't expect customer support and you're fine with big banner advertisements appearing at the top of your website, then you can choose free hosting services. Professional websites or those that have a purpose of attracting tremendous web traffic never use free website hosting services. Following are some of the popular providers of free web hosting services.

• Angelfire
• Doteasy
• FortuneCity
• Google Sites
• Host1Free
• Jimdo
• Tripod
• uCoz
• Webs
• Weebly
• Yola

You can visit these websites and know all relevant information about their plans and storage capacity. For low cost web hosting you can avail facilities of various inexpensive web hosting. Hosting a website has become an altogether different sector on the world web. With thousands of web hosting services offering various plans, choosing an ideal one is always confusing. Free web hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting and co-located hosting are some of the types of website hosting services and you can avail any of these services as per your requirement.