What is Web Hosting?

When it comes to developing a site, many clients are unaware of some ongoing associated costs in having a website live. One of the most important aspects to a website is the web hosting that enables the site to be live in the World Wide Web (www). So what is Web Hosting exactly?

Web hosting refers to a service that makes your website available to your users. In general, most websites are intended to be viewed by anyone on the Internet, at any time. If you want anyone on the Internet to be able to view your website at any time, you need to make sure your website is running on a computer which is connected to the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week (24/7).

Web Hosting is an annual fee for storage space on a server, which is basically a computer that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, somewhere in the world! There are many different Web Hosting packages offered out there with the main difference being in storage space and bandwidth.

Storage space

This is the amount of space available to the client to store their website and any other files they may want to have online. Typically most modern day hosting packages offer a minimum of 1GB storage however older packages may have much lower. This storage space is more then enough for most standard business websites.

Bandwidth

This is the amount of space you are able to serve your users on a monthly basis. For example lets say your website is 50mb in size and your bandwidth was 1gb. If you had 20 users access every file on your website for the month you would then run out of Bandwidth and your site would be inactive until your next month’s billing cycle came around (50mb x 20 = 1000mb). This is a very simplified example though and in most cases users will not be accessing every file on your website and there are also web browser tools that help keep bandwidth down by caching files so next time users visit your site they do not need to download everything again. To put it simply Bandwidth is related to the amount of traffic viewing your site.

Other extra’s associated with hosting

Web hosting also acts as storage for your email addresses. Therefore you are able to create email addresses @yourdomain.com. Some hosting accounts have a limit on how many email addresses can be created but these days it is common to have unlimited email accounts.

Argon Design Web Hosting

Argon offer hosting packages starting from $180 + GST a year. Some of the benefits of hosting with Argon are:-

Server Location

Our servers are located in Canberra which is very important for the speed of which the website will load. Cheaper hosting solutions are out there but many of them are on servers based in USA or Asia. The problem with this is the files have much further to travel when your viewers access your site so no matter how fast their internet connection is, they will still not get as fast page loads as they would from a server based in Australia.

Support

You can pop in or give us a call at any time to discuss any issue which we will troubleshoot immediately. This can be a stark contrast to the many call centres and email ticket support only options that the big global hosting companies offer should there be an issue. These can also take days to resolve!

Optimized for WordPress

Most of our website’s are developed in WordPress. This Content Management System requires an SQL database, php and a Linux server. Therefore we make sure our hosting packages will run your website at optimal performance. Many clients purchase hosting packages elsewhere only to find out that their package is incompatible with their new website!

Specs

Our standard package comes with 1GB of storage space, 5GB of Bandwidth, Unlimited email accounts, Unlimited Databases. Bigger packages are available if required.