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A Starter's Guide to Web Hosting
For all the new bees out there who have just recently been introduced to the world of web hosting and are still struggling to understand heavy jargon of technical terms, here is an introductory guide that will help you get familiar with the technical terms and help you understand them with explanations presented in most simplified manner. I will also give you an introduction to how all the hosting services, domain management and websites work, in general. To start with, the terms:
Domain: A domain is a aphanumeric string, example Google.com, that uniquely defines a particular location or site on the world wide web. Every domain is associated with an ip address, example 192.168.***.***. The ip address may be unique to the domain, or a shared one when a single shared server hosts multiple websites, each using the ip address of the shared server.
Domain registrar: The company or service provider from which the public can buy the domains or register the domains with. The user has to register with an open an account with the registrar after which they can buy the domains. Any domains bought are reflected in the users account. There are very many registrars and the domains can be transferred from one registrar to another. These registrars more often than not also provide the hosting services to provide a one stop shop for the customers.
Website: The actual website with pages like home, contact and others, that runs on a domain.
Hosting: A place where the website files and the database are kept or deployed. A website's files may be at one hosting and the database may be on a second hosting but that is not an ideal situation and is rarely the case.
Hosting service provider: The company or the organization providing the hosting services.
Hosting / Host server : In more general terms a combination of the hardware and software on which the websites are put up and run. The hardware is defined broadly by the type of the processor, Data storage capacity, System RAM and the bandwidth available. The software includes the operating system like Linux or windows and the server running on it. For Linux operating system generally Apache server is used and windows based hosting servers use Windows NT, 200, 2003 etc.
Hosting servers can be shared in which case the space, bandwidth and computing powwer of server is shared among many separate hosting accounts, each having one or more domains with websites running on them. The thing to be noted here is that the server is divided into hosting accounts and not websites, each of which can further contain many websites. The other type is dedicated server where the customer is given the full control of a server with the option to create hosting accounts, domains and websites in which ever manner desired, though in accordance with the various usage policies of the service provider.
Name servers: Servers on the internet that helps resolve the request for a domain name (human understandable) to an ip address(numerical resource address).
Control panel: With every hosting account comes a control panel that provides the user with various different tools like file management tools, domain management tools, statistical tools and a host of others. This is basically a software installed on the server itself that helps the clients to manage their hosting server accounts. There are different softwares used for the purpose and Pleask and Cpanel are the two most popular and widely used ones.
Ftp client: An ftp client is a software that takes parameters like the host name, username and password and provides access to the storage space on server, to manage files and directories. These are generally available as installable programs and can connect to a variety of hosts with different types of protocols like ftp, sftp though there are in-browser ftp services also available. Some of the hosting providers provide in browser ftp clients along with file manager (the default area in the control panel to manage the files and directories on the account with a host of other options like managing files permissions etc)
We will now start with understanding how the websites are setup. There are two prerequisites to deploying / installing a website.
1] Domain
2] Hosting
First of user needs to buy a domain. Once this is done, the very first step is complete. Next the user needs to have a hosting where the files and the database (if required) are put up. The user can choose to buy these from the domain registrar itself which simplifies a few things. Once the hosting has also been bought and setup (by the registrar) ready to use, the files can be uploaded to the server using the file manager provided in the control panel or a file uploading client or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client like filezilla or cuteftp. Every hosting account has one primary domain name which is the fist domain name used with the hosting. All the files required to be displayed under this domain name must always be placed under the root / www/ public_html directory on the account. Any additional domains added are known as add on domains and the files for these are to be organized in separate, respective folders.
In case the database is also required, this is set up by going through the concerned section in the control panel. Setting up the database is essentially a highly technical topic and is out of the scope of the general discussion here due to which we will not delve into it deep, here.
After these the website is ready to run on the domain.
In case the domain has been brought from another service provider and the hosting from else where, there is additional step required to setting up a website. After the domain and hosting have been bought, the following additional steps are required:
A) User first needs to login to the domain registrar account and set the name servers there to the ones provided by the hosting company.
B) User then needs to login to the hosting account and add the domain there.
Once done, the changes takes any where between 12-48 hours to be propagated through out the internet after which the website files can be uploaded, database can be setup and website goes online.
I hope that the readers find this article helpful. In future I will come up with more related and informative articles
