FAQs

Whether a large or small business, an institution or as individual user, anyone planning on creating an online presence will require the appropriate storage space for their future website. This is where web hosting services come into play, i.e. for the provision of storage space for a website by a hosting provider (also known as a provider).

Such storage space is referred to as web space. The provision of web space on a server (a computer designed for this purpose), as well as providing the necessary network connections, is usually done at a cost. Simply put, the customers rent web space from a web hosting service provider.

In order to be able to offer customers the highest technical standards at low prices, IONOS provides web hosting in the form of shared hosting.This kind of hosting is the ideal form of web hosting for entry-level businesses. Shared web hosting servers are home to several different websites. This means that your site would share server CPU resources with other websites.

No, other very popular types of web hosting include:

VPS

VPS stands for virtual private server, where a server is divided into individual virtual servers. The advantage of VPS is that each website can technically be hosted on its own server, and even though hardware is still shared with other websites, the computing resources are your own.

Dedicated

With a dedicated server, you are 100% in control of your resources. This makes the website particularly stable and reliable, and you avoid issues that arise when there are traffic spikes from other websites.

Cloud

The resources needed to run your website are split across a multitude of different servers. Assembled together, they comprise the cloud.

Enterprise

Enterprise hosting comprises of custom-made offers that are tailored to suit the needs of your business. Not all providers offer this, but the ones that do are worth checking out if you think a ready-made plan isn’t a good fit for your business.

The first websites were simple pages of text with maybe an image or two. Today, however, anyone with a fast enough Internet connection can stream high-definition movies or make a video call over the Internet. This is possible because of a technology called streaming.

Streaming is the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to a client. In simpler terms, streaming is what happens when consumers watch TV or listen to podcasts on Internet-connected devices. With streaming, the media file being played on the client device is stored remotely, and is transmitted a few seconds at a time over the Internet.

Streaming is real-time, and it’s more efficient than downloading media files. If a video file is downloaded, a copy of the entire file is saved onto a device’s hard drive, and the video cannot play until the entire file finishes downloading. If it’s streamed instead, the browser plays the video without actually copying and saving it. The video loads a little bit at a time instead of the entire file loading at once, and the information that the browser loads is not saved locally.

Think of the difference between a lake and a stream: Both contain water, and a stream may contain just as much water as a lake; the difference is that with a stream, the water is not all in the same place at the same time. A downloaded video file is more like a lake, in that it takes up a lot of hard drive space (and it takes a long time to move a lake). Streaming video is more like a stream or a river, in that the video’s data is continuously, rapidly flowing to the user’s browser.

Just like other data that’s sent over the Internet, audio and video data is broken down into data packets. Each packet contains a small piece of the file, and an audio or video player in the browser on the client device takes the flow of data packets and interprets them as video or audio.

Streaming is the method of data transmission used when someone watches video on the Internet. It is a way to deliver a video file a little bit at a time, often from a remote storage location. By transmitting a few seconds of the file at a time over the internet, client devices do not have to download the entire video before starting to play it.

Live streaming is when the streamed video is sent over the Internet in real time, without first being recorded and stored. Today, TV broadcasts, video game streams, and social media video can all be live-streamed.

Think about the difference between regular streaming and live streaming as the difference between an actor reciting a memorized monologue and improvising a speech. In the former, the content is created beforehand, stored, and then relayed to the audience. In the latter, the audience receives the content in the same moment that the actor creates it – just like in live streaming.

The term live streaming usually refers to broadcast live streams: one-to-many connections that go out to multiple users at once. Videoconferencing technologies like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts Meet work on real-time communication (RTC) protocols rather than the protocols used by one-to-many live stream broadcasts.