A Guide to Web Hosting Services

The internet has perhaps had more influence on the way people interact with the world than any other invention in recent history. In the last decade, the internet has increasingly become a ubiquitous feature throughout society, with a large proportion of UK households now having access to the World Wide Web, providing them with round-the-clock access to the global community.

What's more, many businesses have also benefited greatly from the advent of the internet era, allowing them to ‘go global’ with a simple computer set-up and network connection. Indeed, whilst a company’s website may once have been designed merely to compliment its overall ‘offline’ presence, it is now widely regarded as being one of the most important parts of a business’ public face. And for e-commerce organisations, it is a hugely important resource in terms of helping them to succeed in its industry sector.

But the technology that goes into making the internet what it is today has also evolved greatly since those ‘experimental’ early days, and many businesses are constantly looking at new and innovative ways to streamline and optimise their front-end and back-end internet configuration.

Similar to conventional business models, speed and efficiency are integral to any company’s web presence, which is why many more businesses are beginning to consider how their website is hosted. Traditional web hosting methods would give a website a fixed portion of a single server, meaning that if a website experienced a sudden increase in traffic there would be a real risk that the site would become sluggish to use, or possibly even ‘crash’ altogether.

However, many businesses are now using what’s known as ‘cloud hosting’ services, which are essentially large data centres filled with servers that are interlinked and load-balanced. These servers are shared by many users, who are allocated as much computing power as they need.

Furthermore, changing trends in how people use the World Wide Web has led to the coining of the term ‘Web 2.0’, which is designed to encapsulate all the latest web technologies and helps to demonstrate that we are constantly striving to enable greater creativity, improve communications and enhance the users overall web experience.

And it’s a combination of these things that is driving many businesses towards cloud hosting services. As such, complicated Web 2.0 applications on websites that have a high volume of traffic will benefit greatly from the additional resources afforded by cloud hosting. However, it may not be the best solution for every business.

Therefore, traditional web hosting services are still a more viable and affordable solution for many small to medium sized companies that don’t require a flexible internet hosting service; but it’s always good to have the choice, given that an organisation’s requirements can change overnight.

Paul McIndoe writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.

Source : http://www.bestsyndication.com/