What is web hosting?

Like a platter at a party, web hosting serves your website to the masses. If you want a website, then you’re going to need web hosting; quite simply, it displays websites on the World Wide Web. If you don’t subscribe to a web hosting service, then your site would just live on your computer, hidden from the world. Web hosts give you space on what are called “servers,” which will broadcast your website to the Internet.

What type of web hosting do I need for my simple website?

There are a number of web hosting services depending upon your needs. Since this website development series focuses on creating websites like kevinlonga.com, I will recommend subscribing to the most basic of web hosting services: web page and small-scale file hosting. In this type of web hosting service, you may upload (or “put up” online) files via a Web interface or File Transfer Protocol (FTP), which transfers files from one host to another host over the Internet.

Your most common form of small-scale file hosting is called “shared web hosting service”. Here your web host will place your website on the same server as many other sites—hence, service providers use the term “shared.” This means that all websites on this server share resources (like RAM and CPU) and features (like WordPress hosting and email clients). And, of course, since it’s shared, you can expect this form of web hosting to cost less than, say, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting or Dedicated Servers where websites don’t share servers with other websites.

What web hosting services do you recommend?

inmotionhosting.com – A highly reliable web hosting service with excellent customer service; I use this web hosting service for kevinlonga.com.

godaddy.com – Remember those Superbowl ads with scantily-clad women wearing green bras? They didn’t sell wonderbras; they sold web hosting.

bluehost.com – Another quality web hosting service provider that millions of websites use for their web hosting.