Meaning of some important terms used in web hosting

Why do we need a web host?
Any website is a collection of HTML pages. To store these HTML pages you need a space (server) which should be always connected to the world-wide-web or the internet, so that any person who is looking for your site can view it irrespective of whether it is day or night, whether you are awake or asleep.  Web host provide you exactly with that

What are the types of web hosting?
These can be of many types but the two most common you will find are shared web hosting and dedicated web hosting.

• Shared web hosting: This can be best explained with the help of an example. Suppose your web host has a total diskspace of 100MB. He sells 15 accounts of 10 MB each. Effectively that means he should have 150 MB. Here is where the catch is, the shared web hosting provider assumes that out of the 15 accounts, not more than 3-4 people will run to its full capacity (and yes that is what happens in reality). Here is some maths:
1. Four running to full capacity: 4*10= 40MB
   
2. Ten running half of capacity 10*(10/2) = 50MB
   
3. One running say say more than half of capacity = 7MB
   
   Total is 97 MB which is less than 100 MB that web host has with him. This is a kind of win -win situation for both the web-host and the customer. For the web-host he is able to make use of the unused space on his servers while for the customer he gets a server at a relatively cheaper price than if the space were solely dedicated for him..

• Dedicated Web Hosting: As the name suggests, with dedicated web hosting you get a space on server which is solely dedicated for you . So if you apply for 10MB, the whole of 10MB will be yours only, whether you use it or not.It will NEVER be shared with another person. 

For small and mid size publishers it is always advisable to go with shared web hosting providers.  

What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the total size of all files transferred to web surfers from your site. So if your main page is 50KB total and 1000 people visit it a month, that will be a total of 50000KB of bandwidth used, or 50MB. Extra bandwidth means you will get 10% of 5TB = ~ 500 GB Extra at Sign Up

What is Diskspace?
Disk space or storage space is how much space you have on our server for every file that makes up your web site. So if your files size is 50 MB it will simply occupy 50MB of your allotted disk space. Extra disk space means you will get 10% of 500GB = 50GB Extra at Sign Up