Media Hosting Sites

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a server side scripting language which is most suitable for website development. Php is placed in HTML pages. PHP scripts are executed on the server. PHP supports many databases like MYSQL, Oracle etc.. You can query from db & retrieve data. Almost all free webhosts allow php or provide this service.
PHP files contain html tags and are sent to browser as plain html pages. They might have extension like .php or .php3 or .phtml .
PHP is platform independent.

To practice php on you computer you need to download php parser from http://www.php.net/

What is the most efficient way to save bandwidth?
Outsourcing!!!!

Thing you can outsource
video
audio
documents
pictures

Dude that includes all!!
Nope you cannot outsource  web pages (obviously!)

Video
          Serving large sized video files like movies or video tutorials can really mess up your bandwidth. If that video tutorial is popular it will consume a lot of bandwidth. Let say you video is of 50MB in size. About 10 visitors download this video every day. Then total bandwidth utilization only for that file is 15000MB/month (50x10x30). OMG! thats a lot.15GB of bandwidth for only one single video file. Just imagine how much bandwidhth you have to buy if a single video file takes 15 gb of bandwidth.

There are large websites like YouTube & megavideo where you can upload your videos and they provide you with code to embed that video in your blog or website. Megavideo also pays you for you video views. I suggest uploading your tutorials to megavideo as they allow video size upto 500mb for a free-registered member while YouTube allows only 100MB & limits the length of video to 10 min. Uploading to these popular video hosts also has other benefits like, free traffic. Many of these popular video sites bring large traffice to your website. Most of the visitors who are visiting youtube finds your video then comes to your homepage for more information (given you have lfet a link to your website there.)

If you don't want to stream vidoe files you have to upload these huge video files to free file hosting websites. There are really some good free file hosting websites. They have been popular these days. There is a seperate post on free file hosts( the topic is too large to discuss here).

Returrn to top
Audio Files
Most of the time you can upload all audio files to free file hosting websites but there are some services that stream audio for you. Supload is also one of these hosts that provide you embed code to put in your website to play these audio files.

Documents
Can documents occupy large space. Yes and no. Depends on size of the document. IF the document is of 1 mb just keep it in your website. If it is more than 10 mb share in free file hosting websites. There are some good & popular document hosts like SCRIBD where you can upload almost all types of documents and embed them in your website. The visitor doesn't need to have any special software (expcept ADOBE flash player) to view that document. These document hosting sites are popular so you can get some free traffic from these site to your blog or website. Just don't forget to leave a link to your website in the documents you have uploaded and your profile in that site.
Returrn to top

Picture:-
Yes pictures cost a lot of bandwidth for you. IF you are a template builder or a designer who caters free templates then i highly recommend uploading the pictures you use in templates to either photbucket or imageshack. Don't upload pictures used in your website to these file hosts. You images are loaded every time a person opens you website so its better to keep in a place where large bandwidth is available (your webhost). But imageshack does allow about 300 megabytes of transfer per hour for each hotlinked file. So you might consider using it.
Returrn to top

What is html?
                  HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a computer programming language that is used in website development. Html files are just some simple text files with extension .html or .htm with tags in it. HTML is basic website development language. You can learn basics of html in just an hour of reading and practice. There are other types of html like shtml where there are some serverside scripting lines that are executed before the file is sent to the user. Html is powerful static web programming language or dhtml which combines javascript with html to produce dynamic pages. There are some good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors that can generate HTML automatically for you. All you need to is drag and drop images or type text as in Microsoft word.

ASP (Active Sever Pages) are the web pages on a ISS (Internet Information Services). ASP is a server-side scripting environment (not a scripting language) developed by Microsoft that allows embedding of scripting commands in HTML pages to create dynamic web pages. If you want to code or develop a website using ASP technology, you have to get a windows webhosting. ASP also includes jscript and VBScript engines. As the scripts are executed on the server there is no need for browser to support scripts. Optimized asp coding can reduce network traffic. You source code is secure as it cannot be viewed from the browser. There are many more advantages. It can save your time as it takes less time to develop website in asp.

Virtual hosting is same as share hosting. Shared hosting or virtual hosting means that you are sharing the web space or bandwidth of the server with other many websites. Usually there are few websites that require dedicated hosting. Shared hosting suffices the need of most people and this option is reliable and cheap or affordable. Dedicated hosting costs from 150$ /month where as you can get a very good shared hosting for 100$/year.
But there are limitations to shared hosting. In shared hosting you will be sharing the server's CPU & memory (ram) with other many more websites. Shared hosting is recommended for websites that have traffic less than 100,000/month (one hundred thousand).

The process of renting bandwidth and disk space to setup a website of your own is called webhosting.
You can get a free webhosting. There are numerous web hosts that provide free webhosting like Doteasy.com , 110mb and many more web hosting companies (more than 250). But most of them place ads on your website and it can become annoying.

Anyway nothing beats paid hosting. Paid hosting is always reliable than free hosts and they allow ads on your websites. There are many types of webhosting like

Free web hosting
Reseller webhosting
Shared web hosting
Dedicated Webhosting

Many web hosting companies advertise about unlimited bandwidth. Is it really possible for these companies who don't even own their line to be able to provide bandwidth. Some companies find providing unlimited bandwidth possible as most of the webmasters bandwidth usage is below average hence providing the remaining bandwidth to others who require more (i.e, unlimited bandwidth). If your hosting company provides unlimited hosting bandwidth then first read the unlimited conditions given to provide such service, like your content should not take high CPU usage etc.. Bandwidth is one of the costliest resource. It is not cheap as they show.

Many of these unlimited bandwidth providers restrict video and audio files. These multimedia files consume huge hard disk space and bandwidth. The streaming video also takes heavy load. Unlimited disk space / bandwidth is just a trick to attract customers. I have seen one host saying that unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth only for 6$ /month (condition -- if you pay for 10 years of service in advance). Are you stupid to tied up for a single webhost for years without knowing their credibility? Their service might go down hill over the span of 10 years and you have to bear with them for 10 years!!! WTF!!
So choose unlimited webhosting if you know your disk space and bandwidth usage. If you want to have a large site with numerous multimedia files unlimited is not an option because you will eventually run into trouble with them.

There are large number of free web hosting companies, but the number of companies that provide reliable free hosting is low.

Just search for free web hosting and you will get about 22 million search results on Google. The free website hosting is a way to promote own paid hosting. Most of the hosts provide free hosting to attract visitors , impress with their service and convert them to paid hosting. Most of the free hosting packages has severe restrictions on technologies available to use. The disk space and bandwidth are limited. Some provide large space like 5gb but place restriction on multimedia files like video, audio and .exe files. Some free website providers provide database support & some don't as database applications can cause heavy load on the servers. There are as many as 200 free website hosting providers.

Some of these webhosts offer free website hosting without any banners or popups on your website. An some even allow you to put your own ads like Google ads. But most of the free website hosting is unreliable and paid hosting is always recommended due to their reliability

To know more about web hosting visit this post

Dedicated hosting is the most reliable and expensive option in webhosting. In shared web hosting you will be sharing server’s disk space, bandwidth and other system resources with many webmasters. Your 300 GB of hard disk space is just a part of some 5tb or 50tb space available on the servers. The rest of the space is occupied by the websites of others. Your applications shared the memory of the web server along with applications of other webmasters. Of course, the servers have bandwidth limits which your website will be sharing with many other websites. Then why do people buy shared web hosting options? Obvious reason, the costs!!! Dedicated hosting costs about 60$ to 300$ per month with which you can buy a whole years plan of expensive or premium shared hosting.

Then what does this so expensive dedicated hosting include? When they say dedicated hosting then the whole server is reserved for your website. Only your applications use the memory or CPU of the server. Or they are only running on the server. Only you website occupies the hard disk of the server. All the bandwidth of the server is reserved for your website. Obviously this option is very costly. If your website is very large and has lot of multimedia files like videos etc and requires large bandwidth, you have to consider seriously buying these plans. Dedicated hosting is reliable due to redundancy. The response of servers will be fast. You will have wide variety of technologies available to operate or use. Even if one web server is down other web server will point to your website, which is called clustered webhosts. Some of the web hosting companies provides unmetered bandwidth (no measurement of bandwidth usage) and unlimited disk space options. If you are a serious business user then I recommend you to opt for dedicated server option.

You have to choose in which OS (operating system) your website will be hosted in. Most of the web hosting providers give option to choose either Unix or BSD like system or Windows. If need to run web applications based on .asp, .netMS SQL, SBS you have to host your website on windows server. If you want to run cronjobs or other unix based applications you have to use unix or linux servers. There are some differences while making a website which will be hosted on linux and windows servers. If you are building you website to host on a linux server you have to name your extension of html files as .htm and .shtml files as .shtm .

For your web pages to be served to the world they must be kept on a webserver which send them to every visitor or client that requests them. Suppose if your webserver has an internet ip address 9.123.168.55. The user or a visitor has to type http://9.123.168.55 to acces you home page. As you can see how awkard it is to type the internet ip address and most of the users forget them (they dont remember all those numbers). Now if you register a domain name like mysite.com then the ip address 9.123.168.55 gets associated with the domain name. When a  visitor types mysite.com in his browser, it requests the domain naming servers to resolve the ip associated with mysite.com which gives the ip address associated with that domain name. Domain  is one of the important  factors of website. Suppose if you search for fruit in google the site www.fruit.com appears in the first ten results. The domain name keywords are very important in search engine optimization. Choosing domain with relevant domain name can boost your traffic. Domain names are also very convinient to promote (like visit my website http://www.mysite.com ) and easy to remember. Also keep in mind to choose short domain names without  any hifens ..