Web Hosting

Overview

In order to have a Website accessible to users it needs to be hosted on a Web server. Apache and Internet Information Server are two of the most popular software packages used for hosting Websites. The Web hosting software needs to run on a computer that has Internet access and most likely one or more dedicated public IP addresses.

Commercial Web hosting come in a variety of packages. In some cases you can run your Website on a shared server; where your Website is sharing CPU and storage resources with other Websites. In other cases you run your Website on a single dedicated server or cluster of servers. The former is less expensive and the later is incrementally more expensive. Modern day hosting systems like Amazon Web services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure allow you to purchase various components, like compute and storage services incrementally on a pay as you use basis. In this case the base cost is usually substantially more, but is more cost effective in the long run for large extremely active Websites.

For more details on the various Web hosting options click the links above to learn about that particular service.