Web Hosting Basics
By Veronica Bendersky, Mon Dec 26th

Several times I have found myself in the situation of having toexplain someone what is. As it turned out, certainpeople instantly got the idea, but for others, it was somethingnew and hard to understand. The purpose of this note is toclarify what is for those who don't know much aboutit.

If you want to have your own website, you need three mainingredients:

-the website pages (index.html, contact.html, for example)

-the domain name, which you need to register. Something likewww.your-domain.com . You may not get a domain for your website,but place it inside an existing domain, likewww.some-domain/my-website . If you're creating a businesswebsite, it is highly recommended that you get a domain for it.It will look much more professional.

-a place where your site resides and is reachable by internetusers. You need to place your site in a web server, a computerwhich is permanently connected to Internet and which othercomputers can reach.

Web Hosting companies have powerful servers and so they canserve several sites in the same computer. They sell the serviceof "hosting", providing a space in their server for your site,and letting you use their server resources, like mail server anddatabases, depending on the package you buy. The web hostingcompany assigns you a space where you save your site pages sothey are accessible through the web. So that's it. That's webhosting, in a few words.

Web hosting packages come in all kind of flavors. You need tolook carefully and find a company you trust, which offers apackage containing the services you need. Do not pay more forservices you don't need. They will be useless. Just get apackage that is enough for you, and then, if your site grows,you can always upgrade to a new level.

Let's have a look at some of the services that may be includedin a package:

-storage space: generally expressed in MB (megabytes). Yourneeds depend on your site's characteristics. You should see howmuch

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