Quite a few businesses and consumers who have websites will no doubt have a hosting package with a domain company or even a third party from time to time. However, very few of these people actually understand how their hosting works at all and just trust in the companies that they use that their services will be of the highest standard, always functional and never in jeopardy of attacks such as hackers or DDOSing. However, there are a few facts about web hosting that may shock you and keep you up at night when you think about them, and so for this reason this article should give you a better insight into how web hosting works and the aspects of it that are most engaging and intriguing.
- Firstly, there is the idea that every single consumer has in their mind about their hosting providers that they keep and maintain their own servers in the same building of their workplace, and even that the servers are owned by the company that provides the hosting service. However, servers can take a lot of maintenance and time to govern properly and so quite a lot of the time these servers can and will be rented by other larger corporations and then effectively used as a third party service in which the domain company providing for you will pay a monthly fee for the server and by extension provide hosting to a number of their customers in order to make a profit. This isn’t exactly a massive problem for most people as those domain companies who use third parties usually also have their own technical support for customers who have issues, but others prefer their servers to be based and owned by the domain company just for reassurance.
- Another extremely common misconception associated with web hosting and specifically emails hosting is that if you have a web hosting package with one company you can only have email services with that same company aswell due to their name servers being pointed to their hosting package. However, this is not the case as a customer can choose to “split their mx records/zone records so that they can be pointed to an email server as well as the web hosting server that they are currently on. This is never usually an issue as most domain companies that offer hosting will provide a free email service with hosting anyway, but for those that don’t or customers who want a specific email provider they can do so very easily.
- Similarly some businesses will be advised or suggested by their domain provider that they should take up a hosting package with them, and so customers often believe that they must have their hosting with their domain company. This is just a desirable from the providing domain registrar and as long as the name servers are pointed to a different hosting package (this will usually require at least a primary and secondary DNS) it is very easy for a customer to get a hosting package elsewhere if they can find it cheaper by speaking to their domain provider and asking them to change these name servers or by manually changing the name servers themselves.
- When thinking about web hosting you may want to take a look at the amount of bandwidth each package provides and then compare this to the amount of traffic you get to your site/plan to get to your site. If you keep a tab on how much bandwidth you use a month you can plan to downgrade or upgrade to accommodate your own specific needs as some smaller sites only need basic packages whereas larger corporates will use a lot of bandwidth every month. It is for this reason that I would personally suggest that you keep an eye on this to either save money or make sure your bandwidth limit doesn’t run out and causes your site to go down for a short period of time.
- The majority of servers that are used for hosting will have a good level of encryption as well as a decent amount of DDOS protection to stop smaller parties attempting to “hit off” your website. However, almost no hosting servers will withstand larger DDOSing parties for a long period of time, and even social media sites as big as Facebook and Twitter have been taken down in the past, albeit for a short period of time. For instance, shown below is an article regarding a particular hacking/ddosing group that have taken down several large corporations in the past.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/30306319
- Finally, if you are looking to purchase a hosting package with a company there is something that you need to understand from a very early stage is that not all hosting packages will provide you with the services that you need or as many features as others. For instance, in a control panel for some hosts they will provide you with free emails, email filtering and site builder services with any hosting package. However, others will only offer the amount of bandwidth used as well as a couple of other things. Make sure you know what you are getting from your hosting package before jumping into a decision.