Welcome to the web world - domain names, web hosting, dedicated servers, dedicated IP address, ssl certificates. These words may be quite confusing to you if you are new to getting a website running. What do you need and what are the extras they are trying to sell you on. For any web site there are two main essential requirements - domain name registration and web hosting. Basically your name like “facebook.com” and a place to keep your files that your visitor will see.

Domain names are just an easy way for visitors to remember your site and type it into their browser. What about the web hosting aspect of it? Well let’s explain what you are doing when you buy web hosting. Web Hosting is like a container for your web files. Files for your web site could be code or multimedia files, such as HTML, CSS or Flash. Your web site requires a server for web hosting, which is basically a computer designed to show your web site pages. Basically a web hosting package is a service provided by a Company that will make your web site live so people all around the world can view it at any time.

Now that we have defined web hosting, what do all these features mean when I am looking to buy website hosting packages? For beginner sites, you will be mainly looking at two main features - disk space and bandwidth. The former translates to the file size you are allowed to keep on the actual web server. The latter means how much data your server can transfer when web site visitors visit your web page. As you want to grow with your site and use more advanced features like for a Blogging system, you will want to look into language support (ASP or PHP) and database support (mySQL). Language support means the Server language the code was written in, while the storage container for your web data is placed in a database.

To summarize, web hosting is a web server that displays your code and visual files to users of your site. Depending on the nature of your site, you will then need to consider package features such as disk space, bandwidth, language support and database support.