HOSTING YOUR WEBSITE

Why do you need web hosting?

Old Town Trading will take care of your hosting needs, ensuring your website is 100% secure and available for viewing 24/7.

To make your website available to the internet community, your files need to be hosted on a web server, a powerful computer, accomodating thousands of requests for your website pages, available 24/7. A web hosting provider is a company that sells space on these web servers to website owners like you. They provide a full-time, high-bandwidth connection to the internet, so that visitors can access your site easily.

How the internet works.

The internet or world wide web (www) is a network of computers connected to each other, provide by companies known as Internet Service Providers (ISP). These companies share their web files (web pages, images, flash etc.) so that anyone can access them from anywhere in the world when connected to the internet. This is achieved by a software know as the web server software, most commonly Apache and Windows IIS (Internet Information Server).

Users access websites by sending requests to the internet using a web "client", most commonly used one being a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Netscape or Opera.

Why not host a website on your home computer?

1. Server and server software (web server, mail server, firewall, virus protection etc.) can be expensive.
   
2. The server needs a 24/7 high speed connection to the internet, which is relatively costly.
   
3. Setting up all the configurations including mail server, FTP server and DNS server can be complicated.
   
4. Server maintenance requires 24 hour support, special skills and knowledge.