There may come a time when you decide that your web site has out-grown any of the shared web hosting plans that are available. Maybe your traffic has grown to the point that your web site is starting to slow down. Or maybe you have a number of web sites, and feel that housing them…
A web server can actually mean one of two different things, either the actual computer hardware, or the software that runs on the web server, receiving requests from clients and responding to them. Here we will take a look at the hardware. At first glance, the specifications of a web server may be very similar…
One term that a web master may see when researching web hosting companies is that the server uses the Linux operating system. This may be unfamiliar to those new to web hosting, and so a brief explanation may be needed. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991, while studying at the University of Helsinki,…
Often you will see that a web hosting company offers, for example, “99.5% guaranteed uptime”. What does this mean, and why is it important? Put simply, uptime is the amount of time that your web site is up and running, and available to the world. In contrast, downtime means that your web site will be…
When starting a new web site, one task that needs to be accomplished is the set-up of any email accounts that will be needed. This will allow a user to receive email addressed to, for example, [email protected] This looks a lot more professional than using an existing email address with no connection to the new…
Active Server Pages, or ASP, is a server-side scripting engine that allows web site developers to add interactive functions to web pages. Such dynamically-generated pages use input from the user to determine how a web page is presented. An example of its use would be to enable a web site visitor to log into a…
There is an old saying – “you can’t get a quart out of a pint pot”. Well, server overselling is one way of trying to achieve just that. Server overselling means that the web hosting company sells more disk space or bandwidth, or both, than the server can actually accommodate. The reasoning behind this is…
A virtual private server (VPS), also called a virtual dedicated server (VDS), is a virtual server that appears to the user as a dedicated server, but that is actually installed on a computer serving multiple websites. A single computer can have several VPSs, each one with its own operating system (OS) that runs the hosting…
A co-located server is a server that is owned by you but located in a hosting companies’ data center. All that the hosting company will provide is rack space, power and Internet connections, and IP addresses. You are responsible for all other needs, the server hardware itself and all of the software that will be…
Many web sites are hosted on shared servers, where many different web sites share the hardware resources of one server. In contrast, having a dedicated server means that just one web site is hosted on that server. This means that all of the resources of that server – its processor power and hard drive space…
When looking for a web hosting company you may see the terms shared hosting or virtual hosting. These terms, which are identical in meaning, mean that the server housing your web site also houses many other web sites, often a few hundred. Although these other web sites are housed on the same server, they do…
SSL stands for secure sockets layer, and is the standard means of exchanging encrypted data across the Internet. The most common use of SSL is for securing credit card data. If you’ve ever bought something on the Internet and used a credit card to pay for it, then you were using SSL to complete the…