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Web Hosting is the way you publish a web site onto the internet.  It is the act of renting space and bandwidth from a company to have your web site published online.

Virtual hosting means you will share a server with other web sites.  Most people will just need to have virtual or shared hosting.  The other choice is dedicated web hosting.  Dedicated web hosting is more expensive and not needed for most web sites.

Domain Name is a unique name that identifies your web site.  It is something like example.com.  This is also know as your fully qualified domain name, or top level domain (meaning there isn’t anything before the domain name like secure.domain.com).

You can purchase it from almost any web hosting company.  You have to make sure no one else owns the domain.  You can search if anyone does by doing a WHOIS search.  Most web hosting companies will have a link to a WHOIS search.  This will tell you who owns the domain.  This may  also be helpful if you are looking to buy a domain that someone owns already.

For more information see our Web Hosting Terms page for more information on bandwidth or data transfer.

Some web hosting companies say they offer unlimited with bandwidth, space or transfer, what is means is they do not have a cap.  If you are using too much (as deemed by the web hosting company) they will ask you to upgrade your plan or pay an extra fee.

Lots of web hosting companies have tools to track your web site’s activity and stats.  If they don’t or if you don’t feel like they are very useful you can use a free tracking program Google offers.  It is called Google Analytics.  You have to paste some html code on each page on your site for Google to track each page but it is very helpful and easy to do.

No.  It is an easy switch from one web hosting company to another.

No.  You control the advertising on your site.  If you choose to use a free web hosting there will be. GoDaddy, for example, has free web hosting but it has an advertisement on the very top of your web site.

Sub-domains are when something comes before your domain name in the URL.  For example secure.yoursite.com; “secure” is the sub-domain and “yoursite” is the domain.  Sub-domains are usually treated almost as a separate site from the main web site.

Most web hosting companies make it very easy on you.  The web hosting company has an account manager or control panel where you can upload the documents and images into your account and then they are published from there.  You can also upload them through an FTP site, which is more difficult and not as popular anymore.

They are different operating systems that support and help with different needs.  If you are using Microsoft products such as ASP, MS Access, or VBScript, or if you do not much about how UNIXworks then Windows hosting is probably the best for you.

Technically you could, but it is not a good idea.  Most Internet Service Providers have clauses that don’t allow anyone to use their internet connection for web hosting.  Other than that you would have to make sure your system is running all the time, no one hacks into it, etc. It is worth the few dollars a month to make everything easy on you.