Web Hosting

Web Hosting in New Zealand

Web hosting is like renting your own little piece of cyberspace real estate, and offers the virtual space where you operate your website. From free hosting to dedicated and reseller hosting, there are plenty of options for website owners.

• Web Hosting
• Internet Service Providers
• Web Design

If you’re looking into launching your own website, you’ll no doubt be perusing the many web hosting options available to you. Getting the right web hosting package is a must for owners of all websites, large and small, but where do you begin?

Okay… what exactly is web hosting?
A web hosting service allows individuals and organisations to ‘own’ a slice of the virtually endless space available in cyberspace and make their website accessible via the Internet.

Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server for their clients, and the scope of hosting services varies widely.

Web hosting empowers users with internet connections to use this space to post news, bulletins, documents, data, and files. Some hosts also provide an interface for managing other services like e-mail, and some specialise in certain software or services such as e-commerce, commonly used by larger companies.

A web hosting service offers a site to place your files and data for people to access with their web browsers. The web host will also provide you a means to get an address for people to get to your web site with a web browser and post email to you.

Virtual space
Just like when you rent a premises for your business, you have an allocated amount of rooms and floor space to use. Web hosting providers are like the real estate agents of the online environment, but in web hosting your area is defined as disk space and network transfer.

When you rent a space on a server it’s like setting up shop on the Internet. You can be reached by a unique address (the website address), which is based on the server's address, more commonly known to users as the domain name.

Every server on the Internet has a unique numerical Internet Protocal, or IP, address. Renting space on a web hosting server for your website is like renting a shop in a mall – your website is linked to and identified by the unique IP address of that server.

How does it all work?
Typically, web space is rented, either on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis. There are a large range of web hosting options available, including;

• Free web hosting

• Shared web hosting

• Reseller web hosting

• Virtual dedicated servers

• Dedicated hosting services

• Managed hosting services

• Cloud hosting

Prices for web hosting vary from entirely free to hundreds of dollars a year depending on your requirements and the web hosting package you select.

Free web hosting is often limited when compared to paid hosting, but is a sound option for people wanting small, non-commercial websites. Free hosting is usually supported by advertising, though users can sometimes pay an additional fee for their free hosted website to be free from banner ads.

For more information check out the range of New Zealand web hosting options available via the NZS.com directory.

Tips and Tools images from Flickr: server, magic and question.