What is Web Hosting ?
Buying a domain is not sufficient to get your website. You must have to host your website with that domain name on a server.
You may have your own expensive server setup or you may buy rental services from hosting service providers.
There are huge hosting service providers available with very competitive charges and facilities.
Hosting service providers may charge you for hosting space and other services as per their own business strategies.
There are Data centers created to setup numerous servers. Big internet companies have their own data centers.
Dedicated servers – you may take a dedicated server on rental for your own website. Dedicated server means the complete server is reserved for your website. All the software and services running on this server are for your website. You may install/uninstall any required software/service in the interest of your website. Of course these dedicated servers cost higher. Dedicated servers are suitable for corporate, special business requirements, big web portals or services. Usually they are used when some special software services are required for any website. Please note that a big company not necessarily has a dedicated server for its website. The requirement of dedicated server is decided by the website’s technical and business requirements.
Shared servers – you may take some web space on rent for your website. These are somehow same servers but not dedicated to only your website. These servers may host and run many websites and services.
You may buy desired amount of space on these servers. Charges goes high with more space and more facilities.
Usually a normal company website having 5-10 even 50 pages occupies less than 10 MB. Normally web pages do not cost heavy space consumption. Space is mostly consumed by media files like high resolution photographs, music files and videos. If your requirement is to store hundreds of photos, music, video files then you must take your plan decision as per your data size.
Almost all web hosting service providers provide e-mail facilities to their customers. Understand your e-mail requirements well before purchase hosting from anywhere.
What you should know before purchasing hosting from any service provider is well described in document must know about hosting
