What is hosting?
Simply put you have to have a computer that is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day to "host" your web pages. The computer can be in your home or office, but more commonly it is at a romote location. Some people use the same company that their dial-up account is through to host their web pages. You do not have to access to the Internet or even have a computer to have a web site, although is useful. A computer (server) that keeps your web site available 24 hours a day (hosting) can be configured in many different ways, all of which need to be overviewed to determine if it will fit your company's needs.

What is a server?
As mentioned above, a server is a computer that hosts your web site. The server can be anything from a home PC running a web server to a high speed UNIX based Sun Ultra or Silicon Graphics machine. These computers not only are a home for your web site, they are also are used to deliver the content of your web site to a browser. The company that owns and runs the server can rent out sections of that computer to other people if they want. The degree of access and configuration abilities that the "renter" gets can vary greatly. Simple web site hosting is an example of a very low access and configuration option. Generally you have a web site address of www.theirserver.com/yourcompany with simple hosting. You may have access to your web page directory through FTP and an email address of you@theirserver.com, but beyond that there you are not allowed to "personalize" the main server in any way. On the other end of the scale their is what is called a virtual server, when you rent a virtual server, you are still given a section of a larger server machine, but you have to ability to set up new email address, install CGI scripts and many other functions that don't come with a low end hosting package.

What is a vitrual server?
A virtual server is a section of a larger server machine. Each virtual server has its own I.P. address. A virtual server has its own configuration files for the web server, E-Mail aliases, and POP accounts etc. The virtual server administrator controls any configuration changes that need to be done. Virtual server packages can vary by what the main server machine has set up to offer its virtual server clients. Many come with several CGI scripts already installed and ready to run on your virtual server, some are set up so that you can host multiple virtual hosted domain names. Most virtual servers include Telnet and FTP access, some are also set up with easy point and click managers to help you configure your virtual server just the way you want it. A virtual server gives more control over what you can and can't do with your online presence.

What is a virtual host?
Virtual Hosting allows you to either offer or utilize low-cost, entry level, Internet services by partitioning a Virtual Server into several sub-hosts. Each virtual hosted domain name shares the original virtual server's I.P. address.These sub-hosts can be configured to respond to their own domain names by way of the directive in the httpd.conf file. Virtual domains allow you to have an unlimited number of domains point to any sub directories in your Web site. All of the services available to the virtual host are actually services that belong to the virtual server. This is a fantastic feature for companies with many product lines that want different domains or for Web designers wanting to provide hosting services for organizations not quite ready for their own virtual server. There is usually a small set up fee for the extra domains under the main account, but will still cost you far less than buying several servers. All of the "virtual domains" live under one master account. For instance if you have a domain name of www.mysite.com you could set up a directory off of your main web page directory called "client1". You or servers technician would then put into the server configurations to tell a browser that is looking for www.client1.com it can find it by going to that directory. The person accessing the virtual domain has no idea that it is actually a sub directory of an other domain. Not all servers support virtual domains and hosting. If you think that this option would be beneficial to your company you must be sure when you sign up your master account with a provider that the server has the ability to support "virtual domains".

What is better a T1 or T3?
If a site has 4 T1's to completely different interconnect points, like SPRINTLINK, UUNET, the PacBell NAP, and the CIX, then its customers are much more likely to see good overall traffic patterns and good connectivity to more sites all over the world than if they rely on a single connection point, even if it is a T3. As data moves across the Internet it has to pass through certain points, bottlenecks can occur as well as technical down times. Before you want to place your web pages at certain web site, ask for some their existing customers' URLs; ask for pages which have lots graphics too. Then view these pages to see if the delivery is lively. Ask your friends at some other locations, perhaps using a different ISP then you do, to check them out as well. If in all cases the web page delivery performance is good, then that's good enough.

Megs, gigs, bytes and k?
A byte refers to eight contiguous bits starting on any addressable boundary. A byte can be used to store one ASCII character. A megabyte is 1,048,576 (1,024 x 1,024) bytes, not one million bytes as might be expected. This odd number is due to computers using binary (base two) math, instead of a decimal (base ten) system. 1 byte is the space necessary to store one ASCII character, 8 bits. Computer storage and memory is typically measured in megabytes (MB). A medium sized novel contains about 1MB of information. We count in base 10 by powers of 10:

10^1 = 10
10^2 = 10*10 = 100
10^3 = 10*10*10 = 1000
10^6 = 1,000,000

Computers count by base 2:

2^1 = 2
2^2 = 2*2 = 4
2^3 = 2*2*2 = 8
2^10 = 1024
2^20 = 1,048,576

So, in computer jargon:

1 kilobyte (KB) = 1024 bytes
1 megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes
1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,073,741,824 bytes