Hosting Company
With the spread of the broadband Internet access, it is no longer a problem to upload or download large files and share them with millions of people, or to create and publish a website on any topic and with any type of content. A number of hosting companies make all this possible by providing the needed disk space, connectivity, infrastructure and a number of additional services, which make the web content accessible from any location.
A hosting company is an enterprise that provides hosting services. There are different types of hosting, so the services that clients get are also different, but the infrastructure that companies offer is very similar.
The most popular hosting service type is the web hosting service itself. With a shared web hosting account, each client gets a certain quota of the server system resources and shares the server with other people, paying just for the resources that their account is using. This is the cheapest hosting solution one can get and it is used for small and medium websites. With the Virtual Private Server hosting solution, only a small number of people share a physical machine, thus each account is much more powerful than any shared hosting plan. The last and most powerful type is the dedicated server solution, where one user gets a whole server and can do anything with it.
Some companies also offer a service called file web hosting, or file storage. Again, there are certain limits regarding the resources a client gets, and since large files can be uploaded and website files are listed as such but their content is not displayed, bandwidth and disk space are much more important than the memory load an account creates. Image hosting and video hosting are two sub-categories of the file hosting solution that are gaining more popularity as more people have broadband access at home.
To offer hosting services, each company needs several things, the two most important being servers and Internet access. Depending on what exactly they are offering, they can focus on different things and build their business in a different way. A provider that offers shared website hosting services, for example, will have as many servers as are needed in order for each client to get the guaranteed quota of system resources and probably a few spare servers. A file storage provider will need significantly more servers and many more hard drives to secure the needed disk space for all the files stored on the servers. They will also need a lot of redundant disks to accommodate any new clients that sign up.
Due to the constant work of the servers and the multiple processes that are active on them, specific environmental conditions are needed. Additional services like backup power generators and at least one more Internet provider are also important if the main power and connectivity infrastructure fails for some reason. Some hosting companies have their own facilities, also known as datacenters. Other companies collocate their servers in large datacenters whose purpose is to provide the infrastructure so that the actual hosting provider will not have to worry about the physical maintenance, but can concentrate on software issues and services.
Lonex is an example of a provider that offers the whole range of hosting products from shared hosting accounts to VPS and dedicated servers. They use four datacenters across the globe for their clients' convenience and provide a 24/7 professional support service.