Website ABCs >
3) Website Hosting the Old Way
Before the website builders came along, you built a website on a personal computer (PC or Mac). You previewed your website there in a web browser by using a reference to a folder on our machine. When you were ready to "publish" your website, you FTP'd those files to a designated folder on the internet for your website. (FTP - File Transfer Protocal - It's a fancy way of saying you copied your files from your computer to another computer somewhere else).
When you signed up for "website hosting", what you were really signing up for was a designated, empty folder on a computer that was connected to the internet via a file server. Yup. That's it. A webhosting account was like renting a totally unfurnished room in a hotel.
To get a website online you had to do 4 things :
When you signed up for "website hosting", what you were really signing up for was a designated, empty folder on a computer that was connected to the internet via a file server. Yup. That's it. A webhosting account was like renting a totally unfurnished room in a hotel.
To get a website online you had to do 4 things :
- You had to reserve a domain name with a registrar
- You had to setup a webhosting account with a webhosting provider-- that got you your empty folder on the internet (and then you had to go back and enter information for DNS servers if you were doing that)
- You had to go back to your registrar and enter DNS Server information or forwarding information
- You had to fill up your empty folder at your webhosting company with files created on a PC or a Mac via the use of an FTP client ( a small software package that enabled you to view files on your machine and a remote machine at the same time).
Pricing
Pricing for old school webhosting (website hosting) was all over the map. It could have ranged from $6 to $25 and the difference there was quality and availability of tech support personnel. Companies would often pay $100-300/month (and this is in the mid 2000s). As people's needs grew, and as people started hosting entire servers and clusters of servers things changed. Companies also started doing multi-level marketing types of systems where they would let resellers pay a flat fee for a certain amount o space on a computer and they could then rent out folders for however much the wanted, etc etc etc.
At this point, 4/23/2017, you can get basic webhosting for $2 to $24/month depending on level of support you desire and it goes up from there. While the pricing hasn't changed much the volume of "stuff" that you can mix in with your websites has skyrocketed (pre-configured programming systems, database connection systems, etc).
What has also arisen is Virtual Private Servers which are basically multiple computers running on a single computer, and in that case often times a person could get a virtual private server for $10-50/month and they could run as man websites as they'd like on it, but they had to be more technically savvy.
At this point, 4/23/2017, you can get basic webhosting for $2 to $24/month depending on level of support you desire and it goes up from there. While the pricing hasn't changed much the volume of "stuff" that you can mix in with your websites has skyrocketed (pre-configured programming systems, database connection systems, etc).
What has also arisen is Virtual Private Servers which are basically multiple computers running on a single computer, and in that case often times a person could get a virtual private server for $10-50/month and they could run as man websites as they'd like on it, but they had to be more technically savvy.