Getting started with Web Hosting

Web Hosting services work by storing your website files in high-powered web servers connected to a very fast network. When someone types in your web address, such as www.claranetsoho.co.uk, your device connects to the web server holding your website files and then transfers your website information back to their computer. From there they can surf and view the pages of your website.

It is very important to remember you have to have a domain name so your website can be found on the Internet. The domain name is essentially your company’s Internet address; the same way your company’s street address is used to find your offices, a domain name is used to find your website.

Shared Web Hosting is the most common type of Web Hosting, and is also the easiest to start out on. Shared hosting is a service where one server is shared between many customers. It's favoured the most because of its easy to use system and it is the one we tend to use in our Web Hosting packages.

A web host can have anywhere from one to several thousand computers that run Web Hosting software, such as Apache, OS X Server, or Windows Server. Most websites you see on the Web are accessed from a shared host, which is a single computer that can host several hundred Web sites. Larger websites often use a dedicated host, which is a single machine that hosts only one website. Sites with extremely high amounts of traffic, such as apple.com or bbc.co.uk, use several computers to host one site; if there was one computer hosting, the website might crash due to the amount of traffic.

Many database-driven websites that use MySQL also use a Web scripting language like PHP to access information from the database. MySQL commands can be incorporated into the PHP code, allowing part or all of a Web page to be generated from database information. PHP is an acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language and PHP scripts are executed on the server. With PHP you are not limited to output HTML and you can output images, PDF files, and even flash movies. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.

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