What is web hosting??

A web hosting service is a service provided by some companies to individuals and companies to make their websites visible and accessible worldwide through the world wide web -the internet-. these services are provided for free or on paid basis according to the company you are hosting at.

Web hosting companies provide their services through building huge servers (powerful and heavy duty computers that are capable of working continuously under heavy loads for long periods of time) with extremely large storage capacity and offering this storage for people to build and store their websites on.

Web Hosting Terms & Expressions:

• Disk or web Space: the available storage offered by the web host to customer for website storage, of course the larger the storage the better.
• Bandwidth: the monthly data transfer (download/upload) size available for your web hosting account; every visitor comes to your website download your pages for his browser to be able to view them, this downloaded data is subtracted from your monthly bandwidth. unless you are having millions of visitors every month or offering some large files for download on your web site, this limit wont make you any problems.
• MySQL database: these are the databases used to store the users data and some other stuff, some hosts offer limited number of databases for storage purposes, if you are using HTML or XHTML to build your website you will probably not need this.
• FTP account: stands for File Transfer protocol, it's a protocol used for transferring files to and from your web hosting disk space. there several free FTP client programs, I like Core FTP, and you can check other good well known clients like fileZilla or FireFTP (a plugin for firefox).
• Domains: (i.e Domain name like Google.com)some times called add-on domains, the number of web domains that can be attached to the hosting account, some hosting services limit the number of domains to hosted per account.
• Sub-Domains: a sub domain is a new address created under the domain name like "subdomain.domain.com" for each domain name you purchase, you can add - theoretically - unlimited number of sub-domains, however some web Hosting providers limit the number of subdomains per one account.

Free web Hosting VS. Paid Web Hosting:

As previously said, some web hosts offer free hosting services but with some limited specs to customers who don't want to pay for hosting, this is actually beneficial but holds a huge deal of risk and insecurity for the following reasons:

• The Host can at any time close your account for any or no reason.
• The Host may decide to change all the free accounts into paid accounts at any time.
• Too many limits placed on the account's storage, bandwidth & the number of hosted domains.
• You paid zero, therefore your rights tends to zero.
  

Green WebHosting:

It's the new trend in the web hosting industry, and i actually happen to like it a lot, it's all about environment folks; Green hosting services use clean energy sources, like wind and solar energy, to power up their servers and mainframes that hosts the customers websites and this trend is getting a lot of attention from the both the Hosting company's and their customers.

Web Hosting with the FAT COW:

I like this web hosting service a lot; Fat Cow is one of the oldest web hosting services in the industry and is one of the best out there if not the best one, and they have this great offer, check it out below:

• They are a Green Web Hosting company, so rest assured, you are saving the planet while hosting your websites.
  
• Unlimited Storage, Unlimited Bandwidth & Unlimited number of Domains.
• Domain name of your choice Free for Life (you wont have to do renewal for this domain name ever.).
• A total of $75 dollars of advertisements through Google Adwords and Yahoo search marketing.
• Free online back-up storage.
• they have a very fast & responsive customer support, they are said to have less than 1m response time for phone calls.
• Some other advanced features, such, SSL encryption, shopping cart ... etc.
• Money back at any time if you feel unsatisfied.
• Budget reasons won't make any problems, only $3.67 a month (after 50% discount if you sign up through me).
• The only limitation, that is, they don't host download based sites.
  

So, you can  actually host all your websites in this one web hosting account,if you want to check it out, click here:Fat Cow Web Hosting Service.

Getting Your Domain name:

There are several Domain name sellers out there, one of the best and it happens to be the One i use for purchasing my domains is NameCheap.com, I really recommend it.

Got my domain, now what..?!

After getting your domain name, you need every body who visit it to be directed to your actual web pages that are stored on your web hosting account; this is done through linking the domain name with the IP address of the hosting server -The Internet Protocol IP address is the address given to every device connected to a computer network, using it the internet protocol can route the data from sender (i.e. server hosting a website) to receiver (me browsing that website), you can think of the IP as the traffic system of the internet-, this is like paving the way to your web site and make its address reachable.

Below is a brief tutorial on how to link the domain and web host, I have to apologize though as I couldn't find a better way to add the description of each step other than putting every thing in the caption of each pic, so, I'm sorry for the small font.

now, After setting up the linking between the web host and the domain name, all you need to do is to wait for some time -typically 24 to 48Hrs - for the domain name to be recognized over the internet.

Some PDF guides to help you get your website in the best shape:

• Become a Web Master Short Course.
• Become an Excellent Net Writer Short Course.