Life nowadays seems to be incomplete without the Internet. What used to be a luxury before with only a few who are able to access the World Wide Web in the early 90’s, has now become a common and ordinary necessity in every individual’s daily routine. From a business executive who relies on the web for business mails and transactions, to a teenage kid using Facebook for games and applications, the web space has transcended practically all generations. It has paved the way for the rapid progress of technological innovations, with almost all gadgets such as tablets, cellular phones and other mobile devices providing web surfing applications and programs.
This easy access and connectivity to the Web enabled ordinary people to create and manage their own web pages through a new form of web hosting, which has created a very lucrative industry of providing Internet space to website hosts making their sites and blogs accessible in the world wide web 24/7.
Availing a web hosting service may be analogous to leasing a house to live in or a space to work at. Just like a real house, apartment or building which has a specific address, web hosting provides webpage owners their own website address based on the server’s unique numerical Internet Protocol or IP address.
There are numerous types of web hosting services depending primarily on the nature and prerequisites of the website that needs to be made accessible in the Internet. Single Page hosting is usually adequate for personal web pages and small-scale file hosting sites which use File Transfer Protocol or FTPs or a web interface to allow file uploading. On the other hand, more multifaceted platforms such as PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, or ASP.NET are used for complex websites requiring scripts that allow other interactive functions and professional services such as credit card processing and point of sales or POS packages.
Other common types of web hosting include shared web hosting, reseller web hosting, virtual dedicated servers, dedicated hosting service, managed hosting service, colocation web hosting, cloud hosting, clustered hosting and grid hosting. Specific types of hosting such as file hosting service, image hosting service, video hosting, blog hosting, paste bins, shopping cart software, and e-mail hosting services are also provided by web hosts.
There are also free web hosting services offered by a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) although it has limited services and usually supported by advertisements, while paid website hosting are usually availed by business and commercial web pages.
The growing business of web hosting has made the management of websites whether personal or commercial more convenient, hassle-free and easier.