Web Hosting

The book I read to research this post was Web Hosting For Dummies by Peter Pollock which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. There are 3 major types of hosting your website or blog. Hosted is when a company like wordpress let you have some kind of site that they look after, and it often entails joining a website. There is often a relatively large amount of rules which you must obey and your options for the site are limited. Web hosted is when you pay a 3rd party to host your website or blog. You have less rules and more options but the nitty gritty of running the site is left for you to sort out. You can usually use open source tools like wordpress & drupal to construct the site. Then there is self hosted where you buy a server and have a dedicated web site on it. This is the most expensive option. Another option is having a virtual server where partitioned space is used for the website and the server is also for other jobs or websites on different partitions. Don't be taken in with the idea that a more expensive web hosting company must be better. Many people find the smaller companies which tend to be cheaper provide better customer service. Most web servers use either Linux or Unix and these are a good choice. Most viruses are designed to infect Windows computers & using an unusual operating system excludes a lot of these viruses. Linux also is open source and free. The main reason some people prefer to use windows is they can attach a Microsoft Access database to their website. Many Linux users use the database MySQL which does a similiar job.