What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is term that deals with storing a site on a computer that is accessible to the Internet users. Web hosting could be as simple as storing it on a local desktop computer that has a web server software installed or hosting it in a dedicated data center with redundant backup and load distribution.

What is a Dedicated Web Server?

Dedicated server is usually leased by the data center to a site owner on monthly or yearly basis. The site owner is in charge of maintaining the server and hosting one or more sites on it. Many site owners choose to pay for server management so that they can focus on developing and running their online business.

The sites hosted on a dedicated server are usually safer and perform better as the server owner has a full control of which sites are hosted on the server. Further the site owner can monitor the performance of the server and make necessary adjustments to the server software and hardware.

The advantages of Dedicated Server are better performance, control and reliability.

Disadvantage of running your own dedicated server is cost associated with renting and managing the server. The site owner needs to have substantially higher level of knowledge available to run his/her dedicated server. Once can expect to pay anywhere from $60/month for a basic dedicated server.

What is a Shared Web Hosting?

Shared website hosting companies usually rent or own a dedicated server and then distribute website space among many website owners. This is primarily done to lower the cost of hosting individual web site. However, shared website hosting providers host multiple websites from multiple owners on one server. This is usually safe practice if the site owner is dealing with a reputable company whose priorities are performance and security. However, if a hosting provider decides to sacrifice the server performance and security to making more profit, the problems arise. Quite often, spammers, hackers and phishers use cheap shared hosting servers to attack their victims. This usually puts intolerable loads on the server and quite often makes server unusable for the rest of the sites.

Another disadvantage of shard hosting is that the site owner doesn't have a full control over the servers performance or software that is running on the server. This is usually done to increase security of the server, but could be a crippling factor for many developers who need a variety of tools for their sites.

Advantage of hosting on shared server is low cost and low maintenance required on website owners part. Even though there are many cheap, even free, web hosting deals out there one should expect to pay about $10/month for about 500MB of storage and 10 GB of website transfer.

What do we do?

Our Regina Website Hosting Company Look Matters http://www.lookmatters.com , rents dedicated servers and hosts our customer websites on these serves. So we are a dedicated hosting customer and shared hosting provider. We only host site that we develop or for the people that live in our community. This decision was made to lower the risk of rogue website owners hosting on our servers. If someone doesn't comply with our security requirements we can disable their account and in extreme cases make a report to authorities against an individual or a company that is using our servers for illegal purposes. However this business model would be very hard to justify if we were a primarily website hosting provider as opposed to website design and hosting company.

When one is looking for a website hosting provider, they should ask a range of questions that deal with server location, security, backup and performance. Be aware of companies or individuals that keep their servers in their office or home. These servers are not secured against factors such as power failure, fire, theft etc.