Website Hosting
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is like Internet real estate. If you want to build a house, you need a place to build it and roads to get to it. Similarly, if you want to build a website, you need server space to store your files and bandwidth to access your site.
To put it simply, this means obtaining disk space and the required access and security configuration on a computer (known as a server) permanently connected to the Internet, that holds your website files and makes them available to the rest of the world.
One difference is that while a house has a permanent street address that can't travel with your house if you choose to move it, you can move your website around the planet and point the address (the domain name) to wherever the site is located.
Large organisations with an existing IT infrastructure may elect to host the server themselves, but most sites are hosted in "rented" space in ISPs or specific hosting companies.
Who do you use for hosting?
Purple Prodigy uses Bluehost in Utah, USA, for the majority of our web hosting.
Click on the image below for further information.
Why host overseas?
Bandwidth is extremely expensive in Australia. The cost to the Australian ISPs by the bandwidth providers (e.g. Telstra, UUNET, PSINET, etc.) is on-charged in the price you pay each month to host your site. If you go over the bandwidth limit for your account the costs will soar.
Bandwidth in the United States is very cheap. Subsequently, hosting costs are greatly reduced. Cheap hosting in the US gives far more functionality than most premium Australian products, usually at half the price or even less.
Will the user notice any difference?
The differences to most people are not significant. There are usually other issues that affect performance that will have the same effect whether the site is in the US or Australia. The benefits of US hosting far outweigh any slight performance differences.
Copyright © Purple Prodigy, 2008
