What is hosting?

Hi, Welcome,

My name is Daniel Walter Scott. I am a trainer here at Bring Your Own Laptop.

The topic we are covering today is: What Is Web Hosting?

To get your website from where it is at the moment on your desktop to a website we are going to have to look at two things Domain names and hosting 
At the moment we have what’s called a local site. That means that it only exists on our hard drive so that’s called a local website. We want to move it to a remote website which means uploading it to a host.

So to have a website you need two things a domain name and hosting. The Domain name is the URL and you need to buy one of these for about 15 – $20usd annual. You use the domain name/url to point to a host.

A host is a slice of hard drive on somebody else’s computer. So essentially you have got your website on your hard drive on your laptop and you want to give it to a hosting company and they will store it on there computer and connect your new domain name to it.

The nice thing about that is that they guarantee that there computer is never going to go off line, so when people search for bringyourownlaptop.co.nz they will be redirected to this slice of hard drive.

So that’s essentially what hosting is, they will hold it for you on there computer which is called a server and it means when people access your domain they go off to there computer and pull up your index page that they are holding for you and all the images that they are looking after for you.

There’s a million different ways to buy a domain name. Its pretty easy but my advice is who ever you buy your domain name with, try and get the hosting with them as well as it can be a bit of a drama setting up a domain name with one company and hosting with another. They both want to look after both services and it sometimes can be a bit of a pain.

So pick a host, you got three sets of hosting, I am gong to look at one of the hosts that I use www.freeparking.co.nz … I love these guys in new Zealand and in Australia my favourite one is www.digitalpacific.com.au… and for the USA I use www.lunarpages.com

Have a look yourself, Google top ten hosting companies and search by your own country and decide yourself.

For this example we will look at Freeparking.co.nz…

We will examine their web hosting options, most web hosts have these rough guides, which contain a basic, standard and premium package options. And then they start getting into business options. But for this tutorial all you need is the basic option. 
They are roughly the same sort of prices, in NZ dollars. Hosting can be as cheap as us$30 but remember that the cheaper it gets, it indicates the type of hosting you are going to get.

You can get virtual hosting which mean you will share you new slice of hard drive space with other people, which can be good because it keeps the cost down. A negative side to this is if the other people that are sharing your hard drive can be running malware and storing virus’s that essentially doesn’t affect your website but because your coming through the same hard drive it can slow things down.

So when you’re getting started just start with a basic hosting. I use the standard package because I don’t have a lot of database driven data because my website a front end only / Dreamweaver created.

Once signed up to a particular package you will receive an e-mail contain the FTP details. FTP is the way to connect Dreamweaver to that host.

In the next tutorial we will look at getting your website connected from Dreamweaver on you machine to your host so that the world can see your website… EXCITING ☺