Website Hosting
Knowledge of website hosting is essential if you plan to make your website available for the world to see.
It's one thing to build a website using HTML, but so far in this tutorial, everything we've done has been on our own local machine. Unless you have your own web server with a permanent high-speed connection to the Internet, you'll need a website hosting provider to host your website.
If you already have a hosting provider that's great! But, if you don't, you'll need to start looking for one.
Basic Web Hosting Concepts
Whether you already have a web host or you're just beginning, you should know at least a little bit about the following hosting concepts:
- The different types of web hosting (i.e the differences between shared hosting, dedicated servers, and managed hosting)
- How to choose a good web hosting provider
- Domain names (i.e. yourwebsite.com)
- FTP - for uploading your website to the hosting provider
- Availability - how to monitor your web site's availability
- Technical support - what to expect from a hosting provider
It can be very difficult for a beginner to find information about this. Furthermore, there are many experienced web developers who don't know exactly what it is their web host does. I recommend that you make some effort to become familiar with the basic web hosting concepts, such as those outlined above.
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