Once you have built your website, you will need to make it accessible via the world wide web. Hosting your website simply means that you rent space on a web server, usually located in a data centre, which you then use to store and server your website files.

There are many different types of hosting available with a brief explanation of the most common options below:

Your website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all websites will share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU.

This is a very popular option due to the low cost, however there are some disadvantages such as poor performance due to the heavy loads caused by other people's big databases or exhaustive CPU processes, email delivery problems caused by complaints against other sites, or even downtime caused by denial of service attack against someone else on the same server.

Your website (and only your website) is placed on a single Web server and you gain full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the you do not own the server.

A Dedicated Server offers increased speed, storage space and bandwidth but this performance does come at a price – dedicated servers are more expensive than shared hosting.

Your website is hosted on a single dedicated Web server but you are not granted full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, you are allowed to manage your data via FTP or other remote management tools. You are disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems.

Managed Hosting is ideal for large online corporations, as the extra room allowed by the exclusivity of the server can enable more programs and computer to run off the server, whilst ensuring that the server is managed and maintained by experienced webmasters, allowing you to concentrate on running your business!

Your choice of server platforms should be dictated by the use to which you intend to put it. The majority of web features run fine on both platforms including PHP, mySQL, POP3 etc. If you intend to create your site using ASP, FrontPage, the .NET environment, Windows Streaming Media, Access, MSSQL, or any of the other Microsoft proprietary technologies then you probably need to use a Windows host.