General Info On Domain Hosting

Hosting is like renting space on a computer. This computer (web server) is always connected to the internet and will give your pages to people as requested. You will usually pay for this monthly, the amount depending on what hosting package you choose. The hosting package, will determine things like the amount of space available on the server for your files, the bandwidth or amount of data transferred from and to your server, how many email addresses you can create etc.

There's a few things to look out for with hosting:

• Uptime: This refers to the amount of time you can expect the webserver to be available. No-one can guarantee a 100% uptime, as this would mean that they never reboot their machines, which would imply they don't install updates etc. The industry standard is 99.9% and means that you can expect your website to be online at least that much.
• Bandwidth: This is the amount of data transferred from and to your site during the month. Everytime someone views your website, every image and all the text from your pages gets transferred to his computer, making up your bandwidth. Often, you'll see someone advertise "unlimited bandwidth". This is almost always a scam and should be avoided.