Web Hosting

Web Hosting

web Server

Web Server

Web hosting is often provided by a company that has setup servers with software (also called servers) that is designed to manage and provide access to your website.  This server software accomplishes various tasks and manages all aspects of your website.  A typical web server will manage the following:

  1. Web Server (HTTP)
  2. Email
  3. File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
  4. Domain Name Server (DNS)
MySQL Database Server

MySQL Database Server

The hosting company may also offer access to several other related software and tools.  Among these are:

  1. Database Server
  2. Content Management System (CMS)
  3. Video/Audio Streaming
  4. Forms Management
  5. List Server
  6. Shell access (SSH)

For most users, the main difference will be the storage space and bandwidth.  These are both usually measured in gigabytes (GB), but reflect two different aspects of the Internet.  Web storage space is the total size of all files associated with your site.  Bandwidth is a measure of the traffic associated with your site.  In most cases, the available plans will provide more than sufficient capacity for both.

However, you should make sure to have plenty of capacity if you host large audio or video files.  For example, if you have an audio podcast, the file might be 30MB (megabytes).  If that file is accessed one hundred times, the total bandwidth for that file is 3GB (gigabytes).

Web Server

A web server is software that manages the routing (traffic) and delivery of content related to one or several websites. Web servers are capable of receiving requests for several websites and/or pages within a single website. Each request for information will provide information about the website name as well as the relative location of the content being requested. The web server then uses this information to 1) identify the website and 2) the relative location of the content within the site’s architecture.

For example, if you go to http://thisministry.net and someone else goes to http://blog.thisministry.net/about, the web server needs to identify the name of each website (in this case the sub-domain blog.thisminsitry.net is considered a separate site) and what information is being requested.

Apache Web Server

There are two main web server software available today (though there are several others). They are Apache and Internet Information Server (IIS). The Apache web server has proven to be the most popular web server on the Internet for over a decade and is managed by the Apache Software Foundation. IIS is a commercial product provided with Windows Server products and is managed by Microsoft.