No matter how great your Web design or content is, your website is as good as nothing if you don’t use a hosting platform that will make it available to the Internet for everyone to see. This is what a website hosting service is all about--making websites and Web pages accessible to many Internet users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

As a website owner, you buy space on the Internet from a web hosting provider that will host your site. Web hosts own and keep powerful web servers, which refer to hard drives with huge data storage capacities. Web servers are where your web page files are stored when you subscribe to a hosting service.

Aside from providing space on the Web, web hosting companies provide extra services. The most common additional services offered by many companies include free email services, domain name registration, and 24/7 customer service that provides technical support to their customers.

Because the needs of website owners vary, web hosts offer various types of web hosting services. A web hosting package suitable for a personal website definitely won’t meet the needs of a high-traffic, corporate website. The following are the general types of web hosting services nowadays:

• Small-scale or free web hosting - This type of website hosting service is suitable for websites intended for personal use.

• Shared web hosting - When you subscribe to a shared hosting plan, you will share the same server with other websites.

• Dedicated web hosting - Unlike shared hosting packages, dedicated hosting provides you with your own web server, though that does not necessarily mean that the server is yours to keep. Dedicated web hosting gives you full control and access to your web files since you are not sharing a server with many other websites.

• Managed web hosting - With a managed hosting service, you rent a web server but you cannot have complete control over it. You use a file transfer protocol (FTP) to be able to manage your website files.

• Colocation web hosting - It is the most expensive yet most flexible among the types of web hosting services. Colocation web hosting is almost the same as dedicated hosting, except that you are entirely responsible for configuring the server, including the software used for it. The web hosting provider, on the other hand, keeps your site connected to the Internet.

In addition, web hosting services offer a wide variety of features to suit the needs of website owners. The most popular features include disk space, bandwidth or data transfer, email addresses, subdomains, and scripting languages (e.g. Perl, PHP, Ruby, ASP, .Net, etc.). Some of these features come unlimited or free, depending on the hosting service and the company that provides the service.

Which web hosting service is right for you? It depends on the kind of your website, particularly the amount of disk storage you will need for the web files and your expected amount of traffic for your site.