What is hosting and what does it do

It is easy to create a file in the virtual environment and access it again later, for this you save the file on your computer. When you want to open the file again, you can open your computer and access your file. As it is known, saving a file to a computer means saving it to an internal or external storage device connected to the computer. The file is only accessible from the storage device it is on. This device is usually the internal hard drive of the computer, and in order to access the file, the computer must be turned on and the file location must be accessible. But what if multiple users need to be able to access this file from the same file location? This is where hosting and servers come into play.

Websites are like a kind of file. Each website is hosted on a disk and all users can access the file, that is, the website, using the file path on this disk. In order for this to happen, the file must first be located on a storage device that is always open and accessible. This storage device used is known as a server. Servers should work as a system that can be accessed by all users every hour of the day, every day of the week. Hosting is the general name given to the hosting, distribution and storage of files with these servers.

If you want to create a website and naturally open this site to visitors, you will definitely need a hosting service. If your personal computer is powerful enough, you can provide this service yourself. A powerful computer is a computer that has sufficient bandwidth according to the user volume target of your website, is connected to the Internet over a network, has a performance that can meet all network requests from users, and of course is open 24/7. As it is known, since it will not be easy and economical to have such a personal computer, there are hosting companies that provide these services for website owners. The site can be published on the web and opened to visitors without having a hosting account.

What does hosting cover?

Hosting companies offer various services to their customers and have to guarantee these services. The services provided by the hosting companies can be listed as follows:

• Hosting the website's files
• Access
• Security
• Continuity
  
  

The above-mentioned are the basic services that website owners receive from hosting companies as customers. In addition to these, hosting companies also have services such as maintenance and optimization of servers, SSL certificate sales, domain sales, domain transfer and ready site sales, e-mail.

What should be in a good hosting?

The expectations of the website owner from a hosting can extend to very large scales. These expectations will vary according to the nature of the website and the expected traffic (the term "expected traffic" is used because it is assumed that the website has not yet been published and is in the hosting selection stage, the traffic received by the website that has already received a hosting service is certain).

Uptime

 First of all, uptime (working time) is one of the indispensable issues. A hosting service must be constantly active and working at a stable level in order to ensure that the website on its servers can work 24/7. It is important that the hosting service continues uninterruptedly, except for situations that will prevent the system from working, such as a major technical error, natural disaster, power outage. If a hosting service is constantly interrupted, if the users visiting the site cannot easily access the pages they want and cannot perform their transactions, the website will not be able to reach its purpose. This is one of the most undesirable situations. That's why uptime rates are accepted as a quality standard among hosting companies. Almost all of the leading hosting companies in Turkey have performed over 99% compared to the "Uptime Robot" tool.

Speed

 One of the most important criteria sought in a hosting service after uptime is speed. It is very important that the page load time is as short as possible in order for the visitors to move more freely within the site and to reach what they are looking for quickly. In order not to undermine the user experience, page load times should be minimized. In addition to many factors that affect page opening times, the speed provided by the hosting service can also be a selection criterion among hosting companies.

Functionality

In a good hosting service, it is necessary to provide convenience to the website owner in every sense. For this reason, hosting companies not only host the website on their servers, but also provide services such as domain provision, domain transfer, security certificates to these websites. As a result, although different services may be preferred for these transactions, hosting companies also provide these services to strengthen the competition among them and to provide convenience to website owners. Another point here is that not all hosting companies provide these services. It is necessary to conduct a large-scale research and compare hosting companies for answers to questions such as "which hosting company provides which service" and to what extent it meets their needs, depending on the need.
As a result, it can be said that a good hosting is hosting that can correctly address a website (domain), manage this addressing, make the site at the address accessible to everyone at all times, keep the security of the files it contains and the speed of transportation to the visitor at the highest level.

Where does hosting fall short?

Hosting, which is responsible for hosting and distribution of the website, does not show any functionality related to the organization and design of the website with a function beyond these operations. If we go back to the example given at the beginning, it is related to the hosting and opening of the file on the personal computer, while the editing and usability of this file is related to the user of the file, that is, the administrator of the website. In this case, the content of the website hosted on a server by taking hosting service is completely dependent on the user side. Although the hosting needs to provide maximum support in terms of speed, there is not much to be done on the hosting side in the slowdowns caused by the content of the site. As mentioned before, there are many factors that affect the speed of the site, and speed criteria can be easily reached from the internet.

Although most hosting companies seem to offer unlimited resources on paper right now, in fact, there is no very realistic counterpart to this in practice. Because the resources of the servers are specific and it is inevitable that the excessive resource consumption of one of the sites on the server will slow down the other sites. Various limitations have been introduced in the background to these seemingly unlimited features, so that the server and all sites on the server are aimed to work more stable.

As a result, as the content of your website gets richer and its traffic increases, you will start to get stuck with the limitations in the background of your hosting service. You must be prepared for this. Once these problems start to occur, you can save time in your shared hosting life by optimizing your website efficiently. However, if your website has accessibility/speed problems despite the optimizations you have made, it is time to say goodbye to your hosting and even shared hosting.

Why Use Hosting?

In order to distribute the website, it must be hosted on a server in a network connected to the Internet. Although it does not seem costly to be connected to the Internet and to have a server, in fact, the need for both a strong server system and a fast and broadband internet connection in order to respond to requests is increasing with the increase in traffic volume. As a result, website owners can host their own websites on their own devices while connected to the Internet, but this is not a very convenient system. Because meeting the requests that will come at the same time by the visitors is only possible with systems with powerful equipment. Since the establishment of such systems will cause a large amount of costs, it is a much more cost-effective method for website owners (unless they reach millions of visitors worldwide) to publish their sites on the servers of these companies by agreeing with the hosting companies. In addition, simplified panel management is offered for site owners who do not have technical knowledge. Of course, there are hosting types for site owners who want to intervene on the server side.

Hosting services, where all the processes related to hosting the website are carried out easily, are frequently preferred in today's internet networks and provide high-level conveniences to everyone who wants to take part in the internet world with a site. In addition to the convenience, the economic situation just mentioned makes a great contribution to the use of hosting services.