Obtaining hosting

Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these services. The free services generally have restrictions on how the space can be used, including but not limited to: advertising, bandwidth restrictions, and programs that can be used to edit sites.

Businesses are generally restricted to using a paid Web host to host their site on. Paid Web hosts usually provide many more features, including 24/7 support and personalized assistance. Sites hosted on paid Web hosts also tend to load more quickly since each server hosts fewer sites, giving each site a larger proportion of resources.

A customer also needs to evaluate the requirements of the application. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Active Server Pages (ASP) web sites usually require a Microsoft Windows based server platform. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP Platform. This includes Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Python, Perl or Ruby). Usually there is limited interoperability between the two, although Linux servers can integrate with Windows file services through Samba, and many Linux hosts provide support for Microsoft FrontPage server extensions.

Regardless of whether one is a business or has a personal site that needs to be hosted, it has to be created first. HTML experience is usually required to create a site (and more advanced languages can be used for interactive content, such as ASP or those languages