Web hosting is the act of renting space and bandwidth through a company so that you may publish your web site online.

You can either opt for free hosting that is usually supported with banners and pop ups, or may opt to get paid web hosting, which gives you complete control over your site contents. ia-hosting only offer paid for hosting packages to avoid any need for supported advertising on our servers.

Also known as shared hosting, this form of web hosting should suffice for most customers.

Virtual hosting simple refers to the fact that your site is on one server, and that this server hosts mulitple sites. You are virtually shared – your site will not be the only one on this specific server.

Few sites would actually need the power of a dedicated server, so this option provides to be a reliable and cheap solution.

A domain name is a word along with a TLD (Top Level Domain) ie .com, that uniquely identifies your website.

Please visit our domains page for more information.

Diskspace is the physical size your website can be.

Every single letter on your website has to be stored somewhere on your web host’s server. Each letter is one byte, and a megabyte is one million bytes. HTML pages are usually very small, but it is the extra images, scripts, and even databases that can take up large amounts of disk space.

Bandwidth/Transfer is the amount of data the server will allow your site to send in a month. Transfer is usually measured in gigabytes – billions of bytes. Once you go over your monthly limit, a host may either shut your site down for the remainder of the month or it can charge you ‘overage.’ This overcharge is usually charged per extra gigabyte of transfer, depending on what plan you choose.

Consider subdomains as an extension of your domain. For example, your site is www.example.com. A subdomain would be test.example.com, and another would be webhosting.example.com.

Subdomains are usually treated as separate sites from the main domain site and will require there own hosting package under the main account.

Uploading your site can be done in many ways, but the most popular is FTP.

When your hosting account was created, you should have been provided with an FTP account. Using software such as CuteFTP or WS_FTP, you can log into your host. Then, using the program like a normal windows program, you can drag and drop files onto your web host. These files become live online instantaneously.

Deciding on which operating system to go with depends on your needs.

If you need to support Microsoft products such as ASP, MS Access, or VBScript, then Windows hosting would be better. Furthermore, if you are comfortable with IIS and do not have the time to understand how LINUX works, Windows hosting would again be a better choice.

There are some things to remember.

First of all, just because you use Windows at home does not mean you should use Windows hosting. The two are completely different, and having a Windows system at home will not affect your ability to communicate with a LINUX server.

Secondly, Linux is much more common with web hosts due to its superior stability and because it is free. Since it is free, Linux hosting packages are usually cheaper than Windows. Just because it’s free does not mean it’s not as good – Linux is an excellent product too.

A host has to make a profit to continue operating. Some hosts do not properly understand the market, and may be pricing themselves too cheap.

We provide a more detailed explanation so please call our ia-hosting team on: 01621 840014