Businesses need an Internet Presence, and that internet presence includes both a web presence (where customers can read about your products and services) but an email presence as well (where they can communicate with you directly.)

Web hosting is the use of a specific protocol (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and its requisite services (called daemons, in UNIX parlances) to display web documents (or Hypertext Mark-up Language files). The usual extension for this type of file is .html.

A web hosting provider charges you for disk space (which is usually minimal) and for bandwidth, which is a cost that goes up as your web site gets more traffic. Most hosting providers do more than just host static web pages; many also offer management services (where you get a console that’s much easier to manage things than a straight UNIX terminal login), regular backups, domain name propagation services and more.

Additional web hosting services include database management services, where you have access to a MySQL or PostGres SQL database backend. This is in market difference to prior eras of web hosting, where you would be using a separate database server in most implementations.

If you do have SQL access, you may also be able to get database driven web site hosting, by use of a Content Management System (or CMS). A content management system can be as simple as a WordPress blog, or as complex as a DruPaul installation, or nearly anything in between. The trick is that a CMS allows you much more unified and complete control over how your web site looks.

Your web hosting provider can tell you more about what services they offer.

By far and away the most common “additional service” a web hosting provider offers is usually email hosting. This makes sense. Email hosting is, for most online customers, an easily managed service and doesn’t consume too much bandwidth, provided the service isn’t being used to send out barrages of spam email.

However, that being said, there are a lot of options on email hosting as well, ranging from shared calendaring applications to managed mailing lists for customers to reply on. You may be able to get filtering software up and running, and email authentication going.

One thing you should do early on when setting up email hosting is determine what, if any, sort of web access to your email queue you want. If you are used to using programs like Thunderbird or Outlook (or Microsoft Email), you may not be aware of all of the options for this, from very simple web email readers to very complex ones that allow you to manage nearly everything email related on the server, from mailing lists to folders to automatic sorting of email into boxes.

The last decision you have to make regarding shared web and email hosting is what platform you want it on; there are two basic choices: Linux (which is an open source operating system modelled off of Unix, and is the major player in this space) and Windows Server (which will usually be Windows 2000 or later). Linux is more stable and more secure; it is generally the default option and is less expensive to administer in nearly every way. The Windows option makes sense if you have specific applications that call for it.