Hosting (also known as Web site hosting and Web hosting) is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more Web sites. While web pages are designed and developed on a single computer, they must be transferred to a server, or host, so that they are available to the rest of the world over the Internet. A host is simply a computer that has a constant, high speed connection to the Internet.
You can register and purchase as many domains names as you'd like and choose to have them parked until you have found a hosting provider. To do so, register a domain name and select "Parking." If this option is chosen, a temporary Web page will be displayed while you finish creating your site, sell the domain, etc. The temporary site will inform anyone passing by that this is the future location of your site. The temporary site will be active 24-48 hours after you have completed the purchase.
Also known as shared hosting, this form of web hosting should suffice for most everyone.
Virtual hosting simple refers to the fact that your site is on one server, and that this server hosts mulitple sites. You are virtually shared - your site will not be the only one on this specific server.
Very few sites would actually need the power of a dedicated server, so this option provides to be a reliable and cheap solution.
Uptime is literally what it means - it is the amount of time your site is online throughout the entire month.
The best uptime would be 100%, but because things can break, many hosts offer 99.9% uptime guarantees. This means that if your site is not accessible for more than 43 minutes in a single month, they will reimburse you, depending on their terms of service.
Depending on which operating system to go with depends on your needs.
If you need to support Microsoft products such as ASP, MS Access, or VBScript, then Windows hosting would be better. Furthermore, if you are comfortable with IIS and do not have the time to understand how UNIX works, Windows hosting would again be a better choice. But this is relevant only if you handle the administration of the server yourself.
There are some things to remember :
First of all, just because you use Windows at home does not mean you should use Windows hosting. The two are completely different, and having a Windows system at home will not affect your ability to communicate with a UNIX server. From the visitors' point of view, a website hosted on Unix or Linux will look and function no different than the one hosted on Windows.
Secondly, Linux is much more common with web hosts due to its superior stability and because it is free. Since it is free, Linux hosting is usually cheaper than Windows. Just because it’s free does not mean it’s not as good - Linux is an excellent product too.
For sites requiring more power than what normal hosting can provide, a dedicated server is usually the better route to take.
Having a dedicated server is a completely different from normal virtual (shared) hosting. The server is now fully yours - the entire hard disk and all the bandwidth allocated can be used as you want. There is no longer any CPU Usage restriction. If you need, you can use up 100% CPU utilization. You can put all your sites on this one server without having to worry about paying hosting fees for each site added.
But along with these new liberations come new responsibilities. Most important is to ensure that you server is always patched and up to date. There are new updates being constantly released, which if not applied to your server could let a hacker could gain inner access to your server.
Because management can be so difficult, there are usually two types of dedicated hosting offered:
Dedicated servers come either as just plain installations (where only the operating system and basic services are installed) or with a control panel. The control panel lets you easily modify most server features from a web page. It should be noted that the control panel will have limitations, and will not provide access to everything.
It should be noted that with a dedicated server, even though you may be paying a set up fee, the server is usually owned by the company . you are only renting it for the time being.