Within the society that we live in today, having your own piece of the Internet has become a need for many individuals and a must for most businesses. This is not to become competitive but as a way of surviving in the business world. If you want to take part in the Internet as a business, information resource or directory to name just a few then you have to have your own website; you need to be in control of your own piece of cyberspace.

Web hosting can strangely be compared to renting a property. This is because when you are renting a property you have your landlord to turn to if anything were to go wrong just as when you are using a web hosting company you have technical support on hand to help you if anything were to go wrong with your website or if you didnt understand one aspect of it. It is the process of housing, serving and maintaining files that make up a website. Web hosting removes the need of you having to provide and maintain expensive and complicated servers. A web host is the business of providing server space for your website.

Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data centre. Web hosts can also provide data centre space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data centre, which is known as colocation.

The type of web hosting that you decide upon depends on aspects such as the size of your website and the use of your website. Single page hosting is generally sufficient if your website is for personal use; however if you have a more complex site you will be in need of a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, and ASP.NET).

Having your website hosted offers many benefits over free space offered by ISPs, such as:

" Support for more advanced features such as CGI, PERL, ASP, PHP etc. " You can use your domain name as your web address instead of the long and often hard to remember ISP/free space one " You can use your domain to send and receive e-mail " You are not sharing the Servers resources with 1000's of other users

The web hosting service provider may also provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Some hosts specialise in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure to a hosting company. To find a web hosting company, searchable directories can be used; however it should be noted that you must be extremely careful when searching for a new company because many of the people promoting service providers are actually affiliates and the reviews are biased.

Helen is the web master of Discount Domains, specialists in all aspects of Web Hosting.