What Is A Web Host ?
A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. This then gives people who surf the internet a way to access your website. The computer that the web hosting company uses is typically just like the computer you have at home, the only difference being that it is set up to serve up web sites and is therefore called a "server".

A web host will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

Some large web hosts own their own datacenter (collection of servers), some rent a server from a larger web hosting company and then resell the space under their own company name. In this case the web host will manage your account on the server, but they will be renting the actual web space from another much larger company.  Datacenters have reliable and fast connections to the Internet and also have backup power and high security.

Most web hosting companies do not own a datacenter, but rent web hosting space in a datacenter.  This is what NorthWoods Hosting does.

There are literally thousands of web hosting companies available in the market, all with different types of plans and at different prices. It can be hard to wade through all the options, especially if you are completely new to web hosting and just want to get your website up on the web. All web hosting plans have some basic common features.

Server Type 

This is the type of server software that is running on the server. Windows 2000 server, Linux and Unix are common server types. If you have a basic website then the server type does not matter. If you have a more complex website that has database functions and serves up dynamic pages, then the server type will be more important.

Disk Space

This is the amount of actual space available to you for storing your website on the web server harddrive

Bandwidth / Month

This is a measure of how much website traffic is available to you. Every time somebody looks at your website, data has to be passed over the Internet from the web server where your site is hosted to the browser of the person looking at your site. Bandwidth is a measure of how much transfer is available. High traffic sites like Yahoo for example have very high bandwidth requirements, but the average site does not.  Read below to find out about UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH.

Email Accounts 

How many email accounts you can have with the web hosting account.


How Does My Website Get a Name ?
All websites typically have a name - just like we are called www.NorthWoodsHosting.com - This is a name that points to the space on the web where your website is physically located. In reality, your website will have an address which is just a set of numbers. This is called an IP address and it looks something like this 205.11.109.64 An IP address is a unique address (just like a street address) for your website location. Domain names like www.NorthWoodsHosting.com are really just a pointer to the real address. This makes it much easier to remember websites.

When you buy web hosting it can be easier to let the web host handle everything associated with this. You just tell them the name that you want (www.yoursite.com for example) and so long as that name is available, they will set up your web hosting space so that when people type in that www address, it will automatically go to your website. You can check if a domain name is available on our domain registration page.

If you already have a domain name and need to transfer it to a web hosting account, then the domain records have to be pointed to your web hosting company. Most web hosts will handle this for you, but if you need to do it yourself then you will need to contact the company where you registered your domain name and provide the Nameserver address of your web hosting provider. Your web host will tell you what their Nameservers address is.

Different Kinds Of Web Hosting
There are different kinds of web hosting setups and dependent upon your website and budget, any of these may be the right type. This is not a discussion of the features a web hosting plan may offer - just a description general types of web hosting

1. Free Web Hosting
It is possible to get free web hosting accounts. These are great for small websites, but normally you have to have a banner ad at the top of every page. Some free accounts let you use your domain name (free virtual hosting) and with some your website address is a subdomain of the free hosting company (www.yoursitename.freehosting.com). This second type is called Free Sub-domain hosting.

Standard Hosting for small websites can be very cheap (like at NorthWoodsHosting!), but if you can answer yes to all of the following questions, then free web hosting may be right for you.

* I don't care about having ads or other commercial banners on every page in my website
* I don't care about the performance / reliability of the website
* I don't expect any customer support
* My website is very small and will never grow

2. Shared Hosting
This is the most common type of web hosting account and can be very low cost. With paid shared (virtual) hosting you pay a monthly fee and get a share on a server. For very low cost plans you may only have a small amount of disk space and a low amount of bandwidth (although this will probably not be a problem for the vast majority of websites). 

3. Dedicated Hosting
With dedicated hosting you have a full server dedicated to your website. This gives you a lot more freedom and you can host potentially hundreds of your own websites. Typically you will have access to the server just like you have access to your PC at home. Dedicated servers are normally reserved for large ecommerce type websites, sites that get a lot of visitors (thousands a day), or for people that want to start their own hosting company and sell shared hosting accounts. A dedicated server is more reliable, but also much more expensive being at least $100 a month vs $6 - $20 range of a shared hosting plan.

4. Colocated Hosting
This is very similar to dedicated hosting, except that you own the server rather than rent it. Your server is placed in the datacenter and connected to the Internet through the web hosting providers fast Internet connection. You will then pay a fee for maintenance and bandwidth.


So What Web Hosting Plan Is The Right One To Buy?
You have a lot of choices in the web hosting market and it can be very confusing to find the best deal that meets your needs.

The 1st step before you start to look for a web hosting company is to determine what your needs are. It can be very tempting to look for plans that offer everything. 

Step1 - Determining Your Needs

1. DiskSpace
Web pages (html) are normally very small - on average 40 - 50KB. This means you can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of diskspace. Even at 100KB per page, a 100MB storage allowance would allow more than 900 web pages for your web site!  Images take up more space, but unless you have a big database driven site - it is unlikely that you will need very much disk space. Below is terminology used to describe disk space. If you have a computer at home or the office, then you will already be very familiar with this.

Disk Storage Space Terminology
1 Byte 1 character. This sentence is 25 bytes
1 KB 1000 Bytes
1 MB 1000 KB
1 GB 1000 MB

You can see above that even a lot of pages doesn't really create a big requirement for disk space. If you own a computer at home you probably know that hard drives are very cheap these days. Many web hosting plans will offer large amounts of disk space. This is fine, it doesn't hurt to have the extra space - but unless you have a huge site - you will be more than okay with even 20MB (~200 pages!).  Our NorthWoods Hosting website uses less than 3 MB of space, including images and a database.

2. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is always stated as a monthly limit in either MB or GB. This is the amount of actual data that can be transferred from the web server that holds your website, to the browsers of the people who look at your website.  A 100K web page will use up that amount of bandwidth to transfer to every person who views it.  The good news is that once the page appears on your visitors computer, the page is temporarily stored on that computer's hard drive so that repeat visits to your home page (for example) are not always downloaded.  If you go over your agreed to bandwidth limit, then either you will have to pay an extra fee, or your website will not be available. The amount of bandwidth you use is therefore related to the amount of traffic (visitors) that you receive and the number of different pages that they visit at your site.

There are web hosting companies that offer Unlimited or extremely large quantities of bandwidth for very low prices. This sounds like a great deal! The truth is that this is nothing but a lie and you should steer clear of web hosting companies that offer unlimited or extreme quantities of bandwidth. Bandwidth is a commodity that costs the web hosting company money - unlimited bandwidth is not only impossible, but would cost an unlimited amount of money. Imagine if all of a hosts customers actually USED unlimited bandwidth!  Can you say infinity?  When web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth they are trying to trick you. They know that you will probably not use very much bandwidth. The moment you try to use a lot of bandwidth - then you will find your website shut down.  If you can find the fine print in their terms of service, usually unlimited is ok only until it gets to some small percentage of their available resources.  Companies like YaHoo! and Microsoft spend a LOT of money on storage and bandwidth.  If they could really get unlimited bandwidth for $10.00/month from some other host don't you think they would do it?  Some hosts go so far as to sell your account information to spammers and mailing lists to pay for the bandwidth.  Nothing is free, including bandwidth.  With NorthWoods, your private information stays private.

For most web sites you will not need much bandwidth. Probably 99% of all websites use less than 2 GB of bandwidth a month. If you intend to have a lot of downloads of software, audio or video (and we mean a lot!), then you may end up using much more bandwidth, maybe 50 GB. Adult sites typically use a lot of bandwidth. Sites like mp3.com require an enormous amount of bandwidth, but for the average site - a level  of 2Gbytes will be more than enough in almost all cases.

3. Email Accounts
How many email accounts will you need? Normally 10 is enough, but if you think you might want more then you can usually get them at limited cost.  NorthWoods offers a minimum of 10 email accounts on all its plans.

4. Support
You need to ask yourself questions like do you need phone support, or will email support be ok? Do you want support 24 hours a day? If you have a small website that is not critical (i.e. you don't pay your mortgage with website earnings) then you probably don't need phone support or 24/7 support. It costs web hosting companies to provide this type of support, don't pay more for a plan that offers this if you don't need it.  NorthWoods currently does not offer 24 hour live support, but we do have email support that is answered into the evening (11:00 PM CST).  Typically, new accounts need more support, but once they are up and running, the new web site requires very little in the way of technical support.

5. Server Type
If you have a small website, then it is unlikely that you will need to select a particular type of server for your website. Windows 2000 server web hosting tends to be a little bit more expensive than Linux. If you need to run a Microsoft SQL server database, or use Microsoft Active Server pages then you should choose Windows2000. If you have no clue what these things even are - then you don't need Windows2000 - you will almost certainly be fine with any type of server.  We estimate that well over 75% of web servers run on the Linux OS.

6. Other Features like Databases, Server Side Scripting
Web hosting plans can offer a myriad of confusing features. For the small website it is unlikely that you will ever need to know about any of them. If you are a web designer creating complex database driven sites then you will already know what you need. If after creating your site you have never heard of ASP, ColdFusion, SQL Server, mySQL - then chances are that you don't need to worry about any of these things. If you plan to add a message board to your website then you will need a mySQL database. This is the most common database used with discussion boards.

Step2 - Finding The Right Web Hosting Plan To Buy

There are many web hosting directories and rating services on the web. They all claim to be great resources. For the most part they are great resources...for the web hosting companies, but not for you, the web hosting consumer. Almost all of these web hosting directories are a place where web hosting companies advertise and they are in business only to generate advertising income from hosting companies. Many are run by "affiliates" who get paid a commission for every package sold from their site.  For the consumer they are worthless because you can not find any unbiased information. These advertising based web hosting directories have list of recommendations, top 25 lists, platinum lists etc...they are all just advertising lists similar to the ads in junk mail that might arrive through your mail slot. Avoid these sites, they have no value because you just can't trust any information you will find in them.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

NorthWoods wants to be your web site host, but we don't think you should trust us blindly.  Most hosts require quarterly or even annual payments to get the lowest rates.  We prefer that you pay monthly, it keeps us on our toes.  However, this does cost us more in credit card, banking, and administrative fees so we do offer an annual payment plan that takes into account those savings as well as the interest on a 12 month payment.  We suggest that you don't purchase the annual plan first.  Get to know us, and then after a few months, if you are satisfied, send us an email and request to change payment plans.  We will gladly upgrade you and credit your setup fee from the monthly plan into your payment!

We hope this helps!  Thank you for reading!     Back to Home