What is Web Hosting and why do you need it?

What is Website Hosting?

Website Hosting is the part of websites that most people overlook and most don't understand. It's quite simple once you understand!

In short, your website and the incoming emails need to be stored somewhere. They are stored in a really massive computer (servers), with lots of levels of security. If the Domain Name is the address to direct people, the hosting is the actual physical storage location.

The servers we use are UK based and have lots of backup. The company specialises in this service and Janric is an authorised reseller. They have security on the services such as multiple telephone lines from different providers, backup generators and of course a lot of physical security to prevent unauthorised people accessing the physical servers. Backups, including off site backups, are also dealt with by them. That's why we don't just put the website on a server in the corner of your office!

Obviously this is a service that we have to pay for so we have to pass on a charge to our customers. We send the invoices annually usually around the time of the anniversary of publishing the website. The cost will depend on how big your website is and how much traffic (how many visitors) your website is getting.

We always start our customers off on 'basic' hosting, although this is not so basic anymore. The current basic package actually splits your website over multiple servers so should one crash or be over worked, hopefully the others should be OK and no-one will notice, apart from the engineers.

If that is too slow as you grow we can offer load balancing where the site is split over more servers for a small extra fee or even look at a dedicated server. But we're talking huge websites with immense volumes of traffic before these additional steps are required.

You might want your website to start https (the default is http). This is recommended / required when the website is e-commerce, using contact forms to capture personal information etc. Otherwise it's optional. There is a cost for this of just over £30 per year. We can add this to the website and it will be added to your annual bill.

Many websites also require databases. We use MySQL databases with up to 128mb of space (that's a lot of space just for text). If your site can benefit from a database we'll sort it and you don't need to worry.

Part of your hosting can be your email hosting. This can be separated from the actual website if you want, but usually we'll deal with it for you. This is usually used where the customer already has a domain name and email and doesn't want to move the email across.

But, as always, don't worry about this if you are one of our customers. We'll look after it for you!