Web Hosting Overview
Web hosting allows for individuals and businesses to share their information online.
Almost every company has an online presence now, from car dealerships, to restaurants, and even car wash companies,
and yours should be no exception. It is an important medium for getting your information out to the public.
Web Hosting Requirements
In order for your web site to be available to people on the internet, several things must be configured. Detailed below are the different services required:
- Domain Registration: Domain registration allows for you to "rent" the domain name (e.g. acceleration.net) you wish to use on a yearly term. Domains are never owned, as the registration has to be paid yearly. Fees are paid to a Domain Registrar, companies who keeps track of which domains have been purchased. When domain registration was first available, the registrar Network Solutions was the only registrar available. Now there are hundreds of domain registrars providing domain name registration.
- Web Hosting: All the files that make up your web site need a place to live. Web hosting companies provide this service, allowing other computers on the internet to request the information you have made available. We offer several levels of shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and even co-location services.
- DNS: Computers need to know where to look for your files, so they use a system called
Domain Name System to find your information. When requesting your site, computers ask a Domain Name System (DNS) server (usually one of your ISP's DNS servers)
what the IP address of the domain name is. Think of DNS as a phone book, allowing computers
to look up the IP address of the domain name you are requesting. Without DNS, your computer wouldn't know which IP to "dial".
If the DNS server you use does not hold the record for the domain (also known as the "Start Of Authority" record, the record that states the record is authoritative),
it asks one of the main root servers of the internet. When the DNS server first requests the root server, the root server returns an IP of a NS that contains the record for the
Top-Level Domain (TLD) being requested, such as .com, .net, and .org. The second request DNS makes is to ask for the IP address of the DNS server that
holds the SOA record for the domain in question. The final request DNS makes is to the DNS server that is configured to return the IP address
of the domain being requested.
Below is an example of the steps that occur when a DNS request is made:
Although most domain registrars also provide DNS hosting for a nominal fee, it is included with all web hosting services with Acceleration, eliminating the need to pay an additional monthly fee.
* If any of the aformentioned steps are missing, users may not be able to visit your web site.
Types of Hosting
Acceleration provides three different types of hosting solutions.- Shared Hosting: Your web site is hosted on a machine with resources shared with other clients.
- Dedicated Hosting: Your web site is hosted on its own machine, isolated from other clients. This is beneficial if your site demands maximum performance and require custom software installed on the system.
- Co-location: Your web site, along with any other applications you need to run, is hosted on a server you have previously purchased within our facilities.
Reliability
We maintain a 99.9% uptime on all of our shared hosting services. Scheduled downtime is spent on maintaning security patches to our servers, insuring that we provide a secure environment to our customers.
Overselling
Acceleration does not oversell their services, unlike other hosting companies. Overselling occurs when an unattainable limit is advertised
by a hosting company in hopes that all of their customers do not use the limits that are sold. A good example of overselling is Yahoo!'s free mail service that
allow individuals to have an unlimited amount of mailbox storage space. It's quite apparent that if every user used up a gigabyte of data, there is no way Yahoo!
would be able to provide the space required to keep up to their offering. The limits we impose are well over what 99% of clients require for web hosting space.
We have always focused on educating our clients on good practices, such as resizing images that can be made much smaller. This is also beneficial to viewers of your website,
as pages will load much quicker, providing a more enjoyable visit.