UNIX Hosting Overview

Your friend has a website and is online. Your friend also has a business that is online. Being this is the case; you decide you want to be online to. So you create a domain name and register it. You develop a website. You have everything complete and ready to go; however, there is only one problem. You have no place to put your website. You don’t have the equipment to host it yourself so you have to find one that you can trust to hold your files for you. Now of course there are all kinds of hosting companies around and they use different operating systems. But the most predominate operating system used by most hosting companies today is UNIX. Why? Well before we answer that question and before you embark on a spree of finding a hosting company, it would be best to consider some facts regarding UNIX. After all, you can’t just jump on the bandwagon without some form or foundation to work with. So here are some features of UNIX you wish to consider:

 

·        Features: What features will you have on your website? What type of functionality will it require? Will you have need for a database? If you have a guest book, shopping cart, forms, or run a forum, you will no doubt need a database program. This shouldn’t be a problem since most hosting providers already have scripts and applications in place to work with databases.

·        Traffic: What type of site will you have? Are you going to be selling products? Or are you going to be offering free files to download? In most cases, you may need a certain amount of bandwidth. Host providers usually supply up to one Gigabyte of traffic per month. However, if you exceed this you will pay. No question about it, Linux has been proven to be the most reliable operating system for hosting purposes. It has more uptime and less maintenance requirements.

·        Power: UNIX has a lot of power and popularity. This is because UNIX was written in C with some Assembly makes it work well with other applications. This is why it is favored over Windows by many hosting companies.