Internet - The World Wide Web
Hosting and Maintaining Your Site

Hosting and Maintaining Your Site

Once you have built your site, you need to find a place to host it. Web sites are not located in virtual places. They run on computers. When you visit a Web site on the Internet, your browser software (Netscape Communicator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) communicates directly with that Web site, which is on a computer(s) running Web server software and a variety of other applications server software products such as database, security, content, and mail servers. In other words, there is a there there.

In choosing a place to host your Web site, you will consider two basic options: host it yourself or pay a company that specializes in Web site hosting to do it. It does not matter where you physically host it, because software is available to set up, configure, and maintain your Web site remotely. So even though your site may make its home off the premises, you can make changes from anywhere! There are benefits to both hosting your Web site locally on your premises as well as having a company host it for you. If you decide to host your site locally, you will need to purchase the hardware and connections required to run a server, plus the server itself, and you should probably hire a full-time employee to upgrade, maintain, and work on the equipment and the Web site. For more on Web servers and technology issues.

One of the big benefits of having a company host your site is that should a problem arise and a crash occur, the hosting company has a battery of staff members to fix the problem and get your site up and running fast. Sometimes they’ll even have it back up before you know there was a problem! Your Web site is your online presence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers expect to be able to find it any time of day or night. If you choose to host your own site and it goes down at 4:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning, who will be there to fix it? It is definitely something to be considered.

In most cases you will want to pay a Web hosting company for this service. First of all, by the time you invest enough money to host your Web site reliably and efficiently, you would need to start your own Web hosting service to recoup the costs. Second, the expertise needed to maintain a high-quality Web server and high-speed connectivity to the Internet is not trivial. It is very, very difficult. In short, in 999 cases out of 1,000 there is no question about the best route to take: hire a Web site hosting company.

There are thousands of companies that will host your site. Their services and prices vary significantly, as does their quality. On the low end there are Web hosting companies that charge as little as $19.95 per month for basic hosting services. This type of hosting usually does not include any kind of interactivity, database services, POP3 e-mail services, or high-end multimedia capabilities like RealAudio or RealVideo.

At the other end of the spectrum, high-end Web hosting companies—UUNet, Exodus, MCI, and all of the other major telecommunications companies—offer robust, yet very expensive, Web hosting services. For most businesses, the services are overkill. You just do not need the fail safe, fault tolerant redundant systems and huge data transfer pipes of the high-end Web hosting services.

* Source - Everything Online Business Book
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