A website must be ‘Hosted’ on the Internet. Hosting companies specialise in this. Many web design companies also have hosting capabilities for their clients. Hosting charges are separate from design charges as they are payable yearly, and are often coupled together with domain name charges. Quality of hosting can vary considerably and can influence things such as site speed, reliability, uptime and the languages which can be used during site construction.

Hosting is usually based on either “Windows” or “Linux” with the majority of websites on “Linux” powered servers.

Hosting can be: Dedicated, Shared or V.P.S. Dedicated hosting is where a complete server (computer) is dedicated to a site, typically very busy sites operate this way. A site on shared hosting shares a server with hundreds or thousands of other sites – this is the most common hosting. A V.P.S. is a “Virtual private server” and in this setup a large server is divided into smaller virtual blocks which are independant of one another. This is much cheaper than decicated but much better quality than shared.

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