What is a Hosting Company?

A website Hosting Company can be an individual that is offering space on his or her home computer on up to mega companies like yahoo that run tens of thousands of servers in giant datacenters and have hundreds of employees.

There is no license or qualification for what can be represented as a hosting company. It is important that you know about your company and understand what they are actually providing.

Since anyone can put up a website and say they are a hosting company it is hard to know excatly what that means. There are no requirements that a company even owns their own web servers or even leases a server.

Many hosting companies are run by teenagers that buy space from bigger companies.

In general a host is just that. Someone that will host your website. That is to store it on their equipment and allow access to that website via the internet.

Hosting can range from selling you a dedicated webserver to providing just a single directory or folder on a shared server.

Most people are simply buying a small amount of space on a shared server, they upload their website and it is available for the world to see.

Hosting companies also provide services such as DNS (Domain Name Servers) so that people can get to your website.

Many companies have self service systems that allow you to manage websites over the web. Some services offer control pannels that can manage accounts, install programs and set up additional websites from the same account.

These c-pannel type systems often give the average person the ability to run their own hosting services. Unfortunately, having a hosting company that is using a simplifed management interface is not in your best interest.

If your webhost is dependant on his webhost and his webhost is dependant on their webhost, weel, you get the idea. Does anyone really have control?

If you are choosing a web hosting company, make sure that have their own servers and they can manage those servers. If they are leasing or buying space, if you have a problem, you can notify them and they in turn notify their host. The middle man scenario is one that will spell certain disaster for any busines website.

Just because the company has an impressive website and offers great plans does not mean they are a good company. It only means they know how to build a great website.