Learning about web hosting can be downright confusing and complicated. There are a host of people that don't want to get down and dirty and learn what it takes to succeed when creating small businesses. Unfortunately, to become successful in the near future, it will be imperative to learn how to market on the internet. By providing a few definitions and directing you to the top ten web hosting companies, I hope to encourage you to get down and dirty and dive into the internet marketing vehicle that will help you succeed in this technologically advanced era.

First of all, what is Web hosting? It is the business of providing the storage, connectivity, and services necessary to serve files for a website. These services are conducted on servers. In information technology, a server is a computer system that provides services to other computing systems ----called clients----over a network. The term is most commonly applied to a complete computer system today, but it is also used occasionally to refer only to the hardware or software portions of such a system.

Now, in the following paragraphs, definitions will be provided for what one needs to know when shopping for web hosting companies. With these definitions (provided by the Wikipedia free encyclopedia), one can make an educated guess and avoid being conned into thinking that he or she has received a good deal when in reality he or she has been duped.

Bandwidth: Each website has a bandwidth limit. Bandwidth is the amount of information downloadable from the webserver over a prescribed period of time. It is the rate [data/time], but the time in this case is not seconds but rather a month or a week. So this rate is not like 56K or broadband, etc., which are also bandwidth but are measured per second. Web hosting companies often quote a monthly bandwidth limit for a website, for example 100 GB/month. If visitors to the website download a total greater than 100 GB in one month, the bandwidth limit will have been exceeded.

Disk space: Amount of storage space allotted to a Web site. Disk space can be used to store pictures, HTML files, videos, programs, and anything else used by the Web site.

Domain: In information technology, the term domain can refer to:a machine or virtual host on the Internet; do not confuse the name of a domain - its "domain name" - with the domain itself A domain name is a name that is entered into a computer (e.g. as part of a Web-site or other URL, or an e-mail address) and then looked up in the global Domain name system which informs the computer of the IP address(es) with that name.

Subdomain: In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. A DNS hierarchy consists of the root-level domain at the top, underneath which are the top-level domains, followed by second-level domains and finally subdomains.

Redirect: URL redirection is a technique on the world wide web for making a web page available under manyURLs.

MB: Megabyte: (1,000,000 bytes) or mebibyte(220 = 1,048,576 bytes); the preferred symbols are MB and MiB, respectively¹

GB: Gigabyte can be defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes or 109 bytes is the decimal definition used in telecommunications(such as network speeds) and most computer storage manufacturers (such as hard disks and flash drives).

Uptime: Uptime is a measureof the time a computer system has been "up" and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was non-operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines. "Five nines" means 99.999% reliability, which translates to a total downtime of no longer than five minutes per year.

In conclusion, now that you've been taken on this field trip about web hosting, I hope that you are now excited about diving into this pool. Based on price Value, performance, reliability, customer support, control panel, and user feedback, the following hosting companies are rated among the top ten best: 1)StartLogic-35000MB;750GB, 2)Dot5 Hosting-20000MB; 500GB, 3)IX Web Hosting-20000MB;250GB, 4)iPower-3000MB;50GB, 5)InMotion Hosting-30000MB;500GB, 6)AN Hosting-35000MB;750 GB, 7)Yahoo Hosting-5000MB;200GB, 8)Go Daddy-5000MB;250GB, 9)BlueHost-30000MB;750 GB, and finally 10)PowWeb-20000MB;400GB. There truly is a whole new world out there. Now let's get ready to get down and dirty.

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