Affordable, search-engine-friendly websites are made in Tennessee

You can have the most attractive website in the world, but until you have a reliable web host, all you have are a butch of computer files with nowhere to go!

The files for our website started out on our computer in East Tennessee. We could see them, but people on other computers in other parts of the world couldn't. We then uploaded them to our web hosting company's server. Somewhere out there in Internet land, you asked to see this page, either through the luck of the draw in random surfing or because you called up the specific URL. However you got here, you arrive at this page because our web hosting company did what it was supposed to do -- serve up our web pages to the world wide web.

A web hosting company provides a "server." A server is a computer with it's own IP address. It serves up hosted website files when anyone on the Internet wants to see them. If you look inside a server, it doesn't look much different than your home computer. It has a bunch of printed circuit boards just like your home computer. It stores data like your home computer. It's a little different in that it has much greater storage than your home computer and has it's own unique IP address or addresses.

When you're ready for the world to see your website on their monitors, you rent hosting space and your web host assigns your website space on their server and an IP address. You load your files on their server, redirect your domain name to that server address, and there you are -- live on the world wide web.

If your site is a small one and you pay a modest hosting fee, you'll share a common IP address with other websites. That's one thing to keep in mind when you select a web hosting company. You want your website to live in a nice neighborhood, i.e., a hosting company that hasn't offended major search engines by hosting spam or porn sites.

You rent hosting space for your website files by the month, the way you rent telephone service by the month. Like telephone service, you pay according to the features you get and the amount of usage. You'll generally be asked to pay for several months in advance.

Several factors go into web hosting pricing: (1) the size of a website's files and the amount of web traffic; (2) whether you share a server or have your own server; (3) and your hosting plan -- some include web-based e-mail, 24/7 FTP, cgi-bin, CGI, Perl, PHP, SSI, Junk e-mail filtering, secure URL, web statistics, and more. Make a list of what you want and compare prices based on features.

A website like our own, with a dozen or so web pages and no e-commerce shopping carts (we tell you what we're selling -- our services -- and about how much they'll cost, but we don't ask you to pay online), would be at the low end of hosting cost, currently around $5/month. A client with more files or lots of big files or lots of bandwidth eating trinkets like flash videos would pay more.

As part of our webmaster services, we offer competitively priced web hosting for our clients through the web hosting company we use for our own website. They have proved reliable and supportive over the long haul.

If we provide web hosting as part of our web design services, we load your website files to the host server, monitor performance, and make sure your website is being served up to the world wide web. If you have questions on web hosting company, email info@oakridgewebdesigns.com.

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