What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a very important part of the way the Internet works today. To the end user, the Internet seems to just work all by itself. Many website owners have come to learn that’s not the case at all.

But what is web hosting, really?

Web hosting is a service provided by thousands of companies worldwide. They set up and maintain entire buildings called datacenters, full of computer systems called servers, and you get some sort of access to them via the Internet.

With that access you can upload your websites. Once configured properly, computers around the world will quickly know exactly where to find them.

There are several different types of web hosting providers. Odds are, if you’re just starting out, you’ll need a shared hosting provider for your website. With that kind of hosting, your site could be on a computer along with hundreds of others, but it is the cheapest and easiest way to get started.

Even someone tech savvy, with lots of computer experience, is sure to have many unanswered questions. We hope that most of those questions will be answered by the series of tutorials that follows.

What is an email auto-responder?

An email auto-responder is exactly what you’d expect based on the name.

Inside most control panels and webmail programs, you can configure an email address to automatically respond to any emails it gets with a default reply you specify. Then, it will discard the message, keep it in the inbox for that email account, or forward it on to another email address, depending on your settings.

Email auto-responders can be used to send a standard “message received” response on a support address, or if you’re going to be away for an extended period and want to let people know you’re not ignoring their emails.

What is Spam?

Spam refers to junk email that’s sent out in mass quantities. On average, three-fourths of the email that’s sent every day is spam.

Spammers find email addresses in a variety of ways, most commonly by searching for email addresses listed on websites and by means of computer viruses and hacking.

They can then sell the lists of addresses to other spammers, and continue to pester people with an endless amount of unwanted emails.

A lot of spam is harmless, but some can contain viruses and links to scam websites. Whenever you recognize an email as spam, you should just delete it.

You should also be wary of any emails that try to imitate legitimate companies; they’ll try to steal your passwords and personal information. They may ask you to respond with it, or they may try to trick you into going to a website that isn’t real. This is known as phishing, and is perhaps the most dangerous type of spam.

Whenever you encounter phishing emails, you should try to forward the email to the company they’re imitating, if possible. They’ll definitely want to know if someone is trying to steal information in their name.

If you find yourself unable to cope with the amount of spam you’re getting, you may want to let your hosting provider know; they may be able to adjust the spam filter settings for your server.

You may also be able to configure a spam filter in your control panel account, or in your email or webmail client.

Should I back up my website?

Backups are crucial to the smooth operation of any website, no matter how important, how many visitors you have, or how frequently the site content changes.

The frequency at which you should take backups does depend on those factors, as well as exactly what kind of sites and software you have on your account.

If you have any web software installed that depends on a database to function, then you should take backups of all your databases at least once a day. The databases are usually the most frequently changing part of your hosting account. Some web software programs have a backup system built in.

If the other files on your hosting account are likely to change often, you should also back them up every day. Otherwise, once a week or once a month, even once every few months should be sufficient. Just make sure you keep the backups in a safe place, preferably on some sort of disc, like a CD or DVD, or an external hard drive.

Even though you may think nothing is going to happen to your information, you shouldn't assume that everything will be okay. Hard drives fail more frequently than most people would think.

Almost every control panel has some sort of backup system in place. Some will let you set up automatic backups, and most will allow you to take a backup manually. If there is no sort of backup mechanism, you can always take a backup manually via FTP.

Many web hosts will take frequent backups of all the accounts on their servers, but you shouldn't count on that. The more backups you or anyone else takes of your account, the less likely you are to lose important data.

What is the difference between CNAME and A records, when should they be used?

Managing domain names can be challenging at the best of times. This tutorial is designed to clear up some of the confusion around the differences between CNAME and A (address) records.

Websites are served from locations that are uniquely identified by a group of numbers, which are known as IP addresses; but to access these sites we usually type in their corresponding domain names, which are easier to remember. To find the correct IP address, your browser will contact a Domain Name Server (DNS) and query its database for the IP address.

What is an A Record?

An A record is a record in these Domain Name Servers that links or maps a domain directly to its corresponding IP address.

For example, when you type mydomain.com into your browser, your browser will perform a DNS lookup which will return the corresponding IP address eg. 111.222.333.444.

Whas is a CNAME Record?

A CNAME, or Canonical Name record, is a record that points to another domain address rather than an IP address.

For example, say you have several subdomains, like www.mydomain.com, ftp.mydomain.com, mail.mydomain.com etc and you want these sub domains to point to your main domain name mydomain.com. Instead of creating A records for each sub-domain and binding it to the IP address of your domain you can create CNAME records.

As you can see in the table below, in the case where the IP address of your server changes, you only need to update one A record and all the subdomains follow automatically because all the CNAMES point to the main domain with the A record:

(sub)Domain / Hostname Record Type Target / Destination
mydomain.com A 111.222.333.444
www.mydomain.com CNAME mydomain.com
ftp.mydomain.com CNAME mydomain.com
mail.mydomain.com CNAME mydomain.com


Examples of using CNAME records


Domains registered in different countries

CNAME records can also be handy in the case that you registered your domain name in several countries and you want to redirect them all to your main domain. For example mydomain.com.au and/or mydomain.co.nz can be redirected to mydomain.com

Products and brand names

In case you have registered several domain names, for example for your different products or brand names and you want to redirect them all to your main domain, you create CNAME records for all these other domains. For example: myproduct.com > mydomain.com.

Limitations of CNAME records

1. Usage of CNAME records means that there is an additional request sent to the DNS servers, which can cause a delay of a few milliseconds.

2. You cannot create a CNAME record for the main domain name (mydomain.com) itself, this must be an A record.
For example, you cannot map mydomain.com to google.com, however, you can map google.mydomain.com to google.com.

3. MX or NS (nameserver) records may never point to a CNAME record, only A records.

What is DNS?

Hello,

DNS, stands for Domain Name System. What it does, is to convert, whenever you type a domain name in your browser, to its IP address. In an easier to understand example:

Whenever you type: www.google.com, DNS’s job, is to convert that domain name to the IP address assigned as the location of that domain name. Therefore, it’d be converted to 74.125.239.20, which is an IPv4 address.

What are the advantages of DNS?

The most important, for me, is that it is easier to remember a domain name rather than an IP address. Don’t you think? It’s way easier to remember google.com, than 74.125.239.20.

The next great advantage is that if for some reason the server changes IP address or the site has been moved to some other place, the domain name would work, while the original IP would not.

And that’s pretty much the functionality and importance of DNS. I hope you now have a better idea now of what DNS is. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please write a comment below.

Best Regards,

Haritha