

But what is web hosting, really?
Web hosting is a service provided by thousands of companies worldwide. They set up and maintain entire buildings called datacenters, full of computer systems called servers, and you get some sort of access to them via the Internet.

With that access you can upload your websites. Once configured properly, computers around the world will quickly know exactly where to find them.

There are several different types of web hosting providers. Odds are, if you’re just starting out, you’ll need a shared hosting provider for your website. With that kind of hosting, your site could be on a computer along with hundreds of others, but it is the cheapest and easiest way to get started.

Even someone tech savvy, with lots of computer experience, is sure to have many unanswered questions. We hope that most of those questions will be answered by the series of tutorials that follows.

Softlater Datacenter - Dallas 06

• an HTTP or web server (to provide the websites)







Shared hosting is probably what you’re most interested in, especially if you’re just starting out in web hosting. With shared hosting, you’ll be on a server with potentially hundreds of other accounts. This is the cheapest form of hosting, for the hosting provider and for you.

One option is another type of “shared” hosting called Reseller hosting. This basically allows you to sell shared hosting accounts to other people. Sometimes a reseller server will be less crowded and better suited to websites with high resource usage.

Another option is a dedicated server. This is the most expensive form of web hosting, and will cost you at the very least $40 a month, but probably closer to $100. Since you probably won’t know how to manage the server yourself, it would probably cost closer to $200 per month total for an entry level managed server.

A Managed dedicated server leaves the hardest parts of operating a server to experienced technicians, letting you focus on the website side of things.

On a slightly smaller scale is the Virtual Dedicated Server, also known as Virtual Private Server, and commonly shortened to VDS and VPS, respectively.

What hosting companies do is divide a very powerful dedicated server up into separate “virtual” servers using virtualization software. Each virtual server gets its own operating system, and acts almost exactly like a real dedicated server.

Depending on the hosting provider and the plan you choose, VDSes may not be anywhere near as powerful as a real dedicated server.

It takes just as much work to manage a VDS as it does an actual dedicated server, though, so really the only benefit is decreased cost. A VDS can typically be purchased anywhere from $10 a month up to the price of a small dedicated server.

So, you’ve heard about four of the most common types of web hosting. There are a few others, including cloud hosting, clustered hosting, and grid hosting, but we won’t go into those here.


Among the most widely used web hosting control panels are cPanel (shown here), Parallels Plesk, and DirectAdmin. Some control panels only run on Linux, some are meant for Windows, and some will work with both types of operating system.

One important note: Just because your computer at home is running Windows doesn’t mean you need to find a Windows hosting account. You only need a Windows account if your website requires features that only work on Windows. Otherwise, a Linux account will work just as well, and with very few differences.

Most versions of Linux are free, whereas you can’t install Windows on a computer unless you pay for a license. Because of this, Windows hosting accounts generally cost a bit more.

Here is another control panel, Parallels Plesk

This is the end of the tutorial. You should now have a better understanding of what a control panel is









While 500 gigabytes of space and 2000 gigabytes of bandwidth for $3.95 a month or unlimited space and bandwidth for $6.95 a month may seem reasonable to some people, you should know that nearly all plans like that are marketing ploys meant to entice customers into buying them.

The reason providers can offer such exorbitant limits is due to overselling. The companies know that most customers aren’t going to use very much space and bandwidth. For those that do, the company is either large enough to afford it, or it isn’t.

You should be on the lookout for those in the latter category. If the company can’t afford for you to use all the space and bandwidth you’re given, you can count on them having some hidden terms that prevent it.

You may find some sort of clause in their Terms of Service agreement that states that you may only use a certain percentage of your space or bandwidth, or something like that. They won’t allow you to get anywhere near the advertised limits before your account is suspended for “abusing” the limits given to you.




That varies from hosting provider to hosting provider.





In general, most hosting providers will not allow customers with shared hosting accounts to resell space. You should check with yours, though; ask support or read through the Terms of Service and other legal agreements.






It depends on whether you want each site to have its own domain name or not. If you don’t mind, you can usually put as many sites on an account as you want using subdomains, i.e. site2.mydomain.com.

Depending on your hosting plan’s features, you may be able to host multiple websites on your account by default. Otherwise, you can purchase the ability to use addon domains. You’ll have to pay a fixed fee for every domain you wish to add.

Buying addon domain rights from your hosting provider doesn’t actually give you a domain name; it just gives you the ability to add that domain to your account. You’ll still have to pay for the domain name, too.

If you’re going to host more than one site, be careful that you don’t violate your host’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, particularly if you’ll be letting a third party use your account in any way. And of course, you’ll need to make sure you don’t exceed your storage and bandwidth limits.


The most common reasons for account suspension are:
• exceeding your storage and bandwidth limits

Other causes for suspension are listed include:
• Spam email messages being sent from your account
• Hosting or linking to pornography, especially child pornography


• attempting to gain unauthorized access to another customer’s account or files
• verbally or physically abusing or threatening the company’s employees


Server uptime refers to the amount of time in a given period a server stays up and running. There’s also network uptime, which refers only to the network side of things. Conversely, downtime refers to the amount of time in a given period that a server or network is down or not functioning.

The goal of every hosting company, no matter what kind, is to keep a customer’s website up and running as close as possible to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Some web hosts may guarantee a certain uptime, like 100%, 99.9%, or 99%, but then go on to exclude planned maintenances, acts of God, and a whole list of other things.

You may also notice downtime that isn’t in any way the fault of your hosting provider. They, too, have Internet providers that can experience problems, and they may not necessarily get compensated by their providers for any downtime they experience. If they don’t get compensated, you probably won’t, either.

Or, the downtime may even be further down along the line. If you notice your site is down, it may be your own Internet that’s acting up.

Also, it’s worth noting that even a 99.99% Uptime guarantee can allow for days of downtime, if spread out across a whole year. So, it depends on the period of time the hosting company uses to calculate uptime and downtime.

The point is that while having an uptime guarantee may be nice, it shouldn’t be the only factor you consider when you choose a web host.











If you’re not quite sure exactly what a domain is, you should watch the previous tutorial.






It really doesn’t matter anymore; you can choose whichever sounds best and is available. If the .com domain of your choice isn’t available, maybe the .net version is.


Domain names can be purchased at any accredited domain registrar. A domain registrar is a company whose main purpose is to register domain names for people.

Most hosting providers can also obtain a domain name for you, but domains can be more expensive this way, due to the added overhead.

There are several very popular domain registrars, including GoDaddy.com, Enom.com, and Dotster.com (shown here). Most of their prices should be about the same.

All three of these sites do, of course, have a way for you to check if a domain name is available for purchase. Let’s take a look at GoDaddy.com.

We can enter a domain here, right on the home page

As we can see, the domain we entered isn’t available. Note the list of suggestions below

This is the end of the tutorial. You should now know where to buy a domain name

Unfortunately, the answer is usually going to be yes. Any address and contact information you give your domain registrar when you buy a domain name will be available to the public, and can easily be looked up by anyone in the world.

This usually includes your name, address, phone number, and email address.

Anyone that has ever had a domain name for an extended period has probably gotten at least one solicitation in the mail from companies about your domain name, trying to get you to buy extras that you don’t really need.

They find this information in what’s called a WHOIS database. Let’s see how easy it is to perform a WHOIS search.

We’ll start from the godaddy.com home page

Here is the WHOIS search at the bottom of the page

Simply type the domain and click Go

All the WHOIS information shows up here for anyone to see

If you’re concerned about random people finding out your information, you may want to pay extra to get a private domain registration. Watch the tutorial after this one to find out more.

If you’ve watched the previous tutorial, you may be worried about your personal domain registration information being available to pretty much anyone that wants it.

Most of the popular domain registrars will allow you to purchase an addon for your domain names called private domain registration, or something similar. Purchasing this can double the yearly cost of a domain name, though, so you have to decide for yourself whether the added protection is worth it.

In this image, you can take a quick look at eNom.com’s ID Protect page. On the left you have an unprotected WHOIS result. Remember, WHOIS is the database that registrars have to maintain and make available to the public. And on the right you have a protected, or private WHOIS result.

As you can see in the registration info below, these services will make the domain registration for you. This is called proxy registration.

One important thing you should know is that when you use proxy registration on your domain name, the proxy company becomes the legal owner of the domain. They’ll essentially be giving you license to use it, but you won’t actually own the domain.

Proxy registration companies have also been known to occasionally give away personal information to anyone that calls and asks for it.

So, is private domain registration worth it to you? You’ll still have to decide for yourself, but hopefully the information in this tutorial will help with that decision.

There is one more thing that you should know. We’ll show you on GoDaddy.com’s website.

Private registration is only available for certain domain extensions. Notably, .us and .ca domains cannot be registered through a proxy company.

This tutorial is now complete.

A Parked domain is a domain name that leads to the same website as another domain name. The domain is, in essence, parked on top of the other domain.

For example, suppose we have a domain name mysite.com. If we park mysite.org on top of the .com domain, a visitor to our site will be able to access the site from either the .com or the .org address. The visitor won’t notice any difference in the website at all no matter which one she chooses.

An Addon domain, on the other hand, is a domain that will display a completely different website. So, If you pay to be able to host an addon domain on your hosting account, you are basically being given permission to host another site in addition to your main website.

Suppose you have MyCatSite.com, but you also want to launch a sister site called MyDogSite.com. You would do this using an addon domain.

It is important to note that buying addon domain or parked domain rights from your hosting provider doesn’t actually give you a domain name; it just gives you the ability to add that domain to your account. You’ll still have to pay for the domain name, too.

Subdomains, though, will work off of your existing domain names. They can be used for the same purposes as regular domain names; they just have an extra part in front.

www is actually considered a subdomain, but one that is usually parked on top of the main domain.

Another example could be if you created two subdomains dogs and cats on mypetsite.com. You’d visit those subdomains in your browser using http://dogs.mypetsite.com/and http://cats.mypetsite.com/, respectively.

You could set each subdomain to go to its own website, or to go to a section of the main mypetsite.com site.

This is the end of the tutorial. We hope you now completely understand the differences between addon, parked, and sub domains.


When you sign up for a hosting account, your host assigns your account a specific IP address on one of their servers. If someone visits a domain name associated with your account, the visitor’s computer will find out the correct IP address to which it should connect.



How will you know if you need a dedicated IP address? Most websites don’t. The most common reason that a website would need an IP address of its own is if it requires an SSL certificate for secure connections to visitors.




Whenever you or your visitors access a website through a secure, encrypted connection, that connection is typically made using something known as SSL.

If you make a secure connection in your web browser, you’ll probably see the address bar light up or some sort of padlock appear. You should also see that the URL starts with https://. The “s” is what tells you the connection is secure.

Both SSL and its successor, TLS, function using certificates. Any business site that processes transactions will definitely need secure connections to work. If this is the case for you, then you need an SSL/TLS certificate.

Businesses will often purchase an SSL certificate from a reliable source, such as Verisign or Trustwave, so that customers are assured that their transactions are as secure as possible.

Your web host may be able to sell you an SSL certificate from a trusted provider such as one of the companies we just mentioned.

You may also be able to generate a free one from within your control panel, depending on which one your web host uses.

If a website is moved to a different domain name, you’ll need to update its SSL certificate(s). This will prevent your visitors from being scared away by warning messages.

SSL certificates always expire after a fixed amount of time. Your visitors will also receive a warning when this happens, so you should try to remember to renew your certificates before they expire.

Those are all web programming languages, also known as scripting languages. PHP is the most commonly used and available for web hosting, followed by Perl (which is what’s used most of the time when you see the phrase CGI or cgi-bin).

What language is used to code web software doesn’t really matter, as long as your web host supports the language. In addition to PHP and Perl, many hosts are starting to offer support for Python and Ruby on Rails.



First of all, you should only use web software if you’ve read a lot about it and found out other people’s opinions of the software.

Any time you upload or install software to your hosting account, you’re giving the program free reign to do just about anything within your web space or possibly even the whole server. You should only install trusted software.


Third, no matter how much you trust the software and keep it up to date, it still may run inefficiently. If it frequently uses up too much of the server’s resources, your hosting provider may suspend your account, or at least ask you to remove the software.


A MySQL database, like all other types of databases, is used to keep track of a website or software’s data.

The technical term for MySQL is a relational database management system, or RDBMS. MySQL is a software program that runs at all times on a server and gives other programs access to the information it maintains.

This information is stored in databases. A database is made up of tables. Each table is structured into fields that can contain a specific type of information; some fields can contain only numbers, while others can only contain dates, etc.

When data is inserted into a table, each group of fields is called a row.

MySQL controls access to this information with usernames and passwords, just like when you log in to a computer. Each username gets permission to do certain things with certain databases.

You can create MySQL databases, users, and passwords inside your control panel.

If you plan to install web software on your hosting account, you’ll need at least one MySQL database. Most web software is designed to share a single database with more than one other software program.

You’ll also need to create a username and password for the software to use. Be sure to make the password as complex as possible, because it’s not a password you’re going to need to remember. Usually, a program will store its MySQL password in a configuration file; you’ll never need the password again after installation.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol – is one way for you to transfer files to and from your hosting account. Unlike HTTP, which is meant for accessing websites, FTP is designed to transfer files.

Because of this, using an FTP client to transfer files can be faster and more reliable than doing so inside your control panel. An FTP client is software designed to work with the FTP protocol.

One free FTP client we can recommend is called FileZilla (shown here). You can download it at filezilla-project.org. On the left, we can see our local files and folders, while the right side shows the content on the server we are connected to.




Email forwarders allow you to forward a copy of all mail from one address to another. For example, you could set up a forwarder to forward all mail received on info@mysite.com to admin@mysite.com.

info@mysite.com will still keep the original version of all messages it receives, and admin@mysite.com gets forwarded a copy.

It’s worth noting that this relationship doesn’t work in two directions. Mail received by admin will not go to info.

Another type of forwarding is a domain forwarder. This will forward all mail received on a specific domain to another domain. If we forwarded mysite.com to demosite.com, admin@mysite.com and info@mysite.com would be forwarded to admin@demosite.com and info@demosite.com, respectively.

The last kind of forwarder we’ll mention is a “catch-all” or default email address. With this kind of forwarder, mail sent to an email address that doesn’t exist will be forwarded to the email address you specify.


Inside most control panels and webmail programs, you can configure an email address to automatically respond to any emails it gets with a default reply you specify. Then, it will discard the message, keep it in the inbox for that email account, or forward it on to another email address, depending on your settings.

Email auto-responders can be used to send a standard “message received” response on a support address, or if you’re going to be away for an extended period and want to let people know you’re not ignoring their emails.



They can then sell the lists of addresses to other spammers, and continue to pester people with an endless amount of unwanted emails.

A lot of spam is harmless, but some can contain viruses and links to scam websites. Whenever you recognize an email as spam, you should just delete it.

You should also be wary of any emails that try to imitate legitimate companies; they’ll try to steal your passwords and personal information. They may ask you to respond with it, or they may try to trick you into going to a website that isn’t real. This is known as phishing, and is perhaps the most dangerous type of spam.

Whenever you encounter phishing emails, you should try to forward the email to the company they’re imitating, if possible. They’ll definitely want to know if someone is trying to steal information in their name.

If you find yourself unable to cope with the amount of spam you’re getting, you may want to let your hosting provider know; they may be able to adjust the spam filter settings for your server.

You may also be able to configure a spam filter in your control panel account, or in your email or webmail client.

This completes the tutorial. Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what spam is, and how to combat it.

Backups are crucial to the smooth operation of any website, no matter how important, how many visitors you have, or how frequently the site content changes.

The frequency at which you should take backups does depend on those factors, as well as exactly what kind of sites and software you have on your account.

If you have any web software installed that depends on a database to function, then you should take backups of all your databases at least once a day. The databases are usually the most frequently changing part of your hosting account. Some web software programs have a backup system built in.

If the other files on your hosting account are likely to change often, you should also back them up every day. Otherwise, once a week or once a month, even once every few months should be sufficient. Just make sure you keep the backups in a safe place, preferably on some sort of disc, like a CD or DVD, or an external hard drive.

Even though you may think nothing is going to happen to your information, you shouldn’t assume that everything will be okay. Hard drives fail more frequently than most people would think.

Almost every control panel has some sort of backup system in place. Some will let you set up automatic backups, and most will allow you to take a backup manually. If there is no sort of backup mechanism, you can always take a backup manually via FTP.

Many web hosts will take frequent backups of all the accounts on their servers, but you shouldn’t count on that. The more backups you or anyone else takes of your account, the less likely you are to lose important data.