Broadband

In one sense, detailing the statement in the title would require at least a book. In another sense, it can’t be fully explained at all, since there’s no central authority that designs or implements the highly distributed entity called The Internet. But the basics can certainly be outlined, simply and briefly. And it’s in the interest of any novice web site owner to have some idea of how their tree fits into that gigantic forest, full of complex paths, that is called the Internet.

The analogy to a forest is not far off. Every computer is a single plant, sometimes a little bush sometimes a mighty tree. A percentage, to be sure, are weeds we could do without. In networking terminology, the individual plants are called ‘nodes’ and each one has a domain name and IP address. Connecting those nodes are paths.

The Internet, taken in total, is just the collection of all those plants and the pieces that allow for their interconnections - all the nodes and the paths between them. Servers and clients (desktop computers, laptops, PDAs, cell phones and more) make up the most visible parts of the Internet. They store information and programs that make the data accessible. But behind the scenes there are vitally important components - both hardware and software - that make the entire mesh possible and useful for web hosting.

As with many purchases, our first impulse when selecting a web hosting company is to go with the cheapest. Hey, they’re all alike, why pay more? On the contrary, there are quite a number of objective criteria that separates one web hosting company from another and money is only one of them. Selecting a company based on price alone is equivalent to selecting an auto mechanic on price alone.

The first consideration you should have is ‘horsepower’. Does the web hosting company in question have the capacity to carry your load and deliver decent performance? Most hosting companies will advertise that they have huge bandwidth and hundreds of servers. They are usually telling the truth, however there is also a difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. These are just a few of the numerous choices you have to make when choosing a web hosting company.