Web Hosting Terminology

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in creating this blog is to help people figure out the way around a lot of the potholes in selecting a web hosting service. One of them is blackholing of some shared hosting providers. I will be writing a lot more on the subject of how to choose the a web hosting service in this blog.

Here is a list of some important web hosting terminology, and I will provide further updates in the future:

1. Shared Hosting: This refers to sharing a server with a number of other customers of a web hosting company. They will locate a number of their customer accounts on a single server. This can result in hundreds of websites being hosted on a single server. If some of them are particularly busy this can result in performance degredation for the remaining sites. This is one of the major drawbacks of shared hosting. Another drawback is less flexibility because there may be some limitations on the programs you can run because the server's resources must be shared. Of course shared hosting is less expensive - a major advantage.

2. Virtual Hosting - see Shared Hosting

3. Dedicated Hosting - The hosting company supplies the server and all equipment, and some software. However, the server is not shared with any other customers, so the customer has complete control over the bandwidth usage.

4. Co-Location Hosting - The customer buys equipment, including the server box, and then supplies it to the hosting company. The hosting company provides the backbone resources, plugging the server into its network, power supply and Intenet pipe. The host manages the infrastructure and the customer the rest. A hosting company also can offer management contracts to its co-location customers as add-ons.

5. Blackholing: Often hosting companies develop a bad reputation as being sources of spammers or excessive resources. As a result, their IP addresses may become banned or otherwise marked by some users, such as by enterprises or by search engines. One result is that e-mail from the IP addresses is blocked automatically. It is difficult to determine if a hosting company has been blackholed, but you should ask before signing up.