If you understand how the Internet and the World Wide Web function, you're a step ahead of most people who use the thing, but who just don't get it. Actually, it's fairly easy to grasp. All you have to do is imagine hundreds of thousands of computers all connected to a non-centralized system of wires, essentially a massive network that no one group actually manages.

It's as if you had hundreds of offices in a busy downtown area, and each building was connected by a wire. Each building has its own network, just like any big company you may have worked for with a server room and lots of desktop computers ("terminals") hooked up to it. With the Internet, it's like all these buildings with their own networks are connected, and nobody at one office building has anything to do with any of the other office buildings. And yet, people in one building can "see" the others as if they were in the same building, trading E-mail and sharing files.

The Internet operates in this fashion, with each "building" having its own address, commonly called an IP address. IP actually stands for Internet Protocol, and most people who were setting "IP addresses" on their Mac LocalTalk networks in the late 1980's had no idea that they were taking baby steps toward what we now refer to as the "Net." Now, you can type in an IP address, but it's not very memorable or helpful to the non-techie because "255.15.255.15" doesn't exactly stick to the brain.

What the World Wide Web does is utilize domain name servers, or DNS, to translate more useful "domain names" like www.apple.com to point at an IP. In our analogy, Apple is still an office building, but it's easier to remember a name instead of a number. When you purchase a domain name, you're really purchasing a placeholder, or URL (Uniform Resource Locater), which must be pointed at an IP address for it to be visible to anybody.

If you take this idea of office buildings and replace it with the idea that each building is actually a "Web server," then you're most of the way there. Web servers take this idea one step further. Imagine that instead of merely representing the products and services available from your own "building," you could also offer separate "sections," or "floors" in our building analogy. Thus, a Web server represents multiple floors in a building that can be connected to from other buildings and from other floors in the same building.

Each Web server can have its own DNS, allowing it to point your domain name locally at your specific "floor," which may or may not have its own IP. When you manage your domain name, you must point that domain at the particular server's DNS in order for the server to redirect requests for your domain locally.

When you rent virtual or shared Web hosting services (the most common form), you are essentially renting one of the floors in our virtual office building. You don't own the building, you don't work there, and you might not even be in the same city, but everyone else can reach your office floor just as if you were there.

Forms of Hosting
In the imaginary place described above, when renting out a floor in a building, you are renting "virtual Web hosting services." This means that the building may have hundreds of floors, depending on the size and construction of the server where you put your domain.

Other kinds of Web hosting include "dedicated servers," which may live in your own office building and which you control completely. "Managed servers" are like renting an entire building in a different city but letting somebody else live there and manage it. Finally, "co-located servers" are like renting the building, but you have to manage it yourself.

The benefits to co-location or managed servers over a dedicated server is that the datacenter, or network operation center (NOC), where your Web server lives, might have more wires leading out to other buildings than your own, and can handle more people connecting to you at the same time.

Moving Data
There is really little difference in having your hosting presence located in one place over another, geographically. Most NOCs have multiple connections to different so-called "backbone providers" that handle the connection from each office to the Internet as a whole. The quality of service provided depends largely on how many connections the NOC has, the speed of each, and the type of Web server hardware used.

If you're renting virtual hosting services, you usually want to look for the hosting provider's hardware to support a minimum of 256MB of RAM, use RAID mirroring to protect data in the event of a hard drive failure, have DS3 or better connectivity (T1 and T3 are not acceptable unless you have a low-traffic site, or there are few users sharing the same connection), and a minimum of 50MB of storage space.

For dedicated and co-location services, you can pretty much choose your services àla carte, picking the right mixture of storage, bandwidth (data transfer allotment), and processor type.

Windows NT is popular technology for those who run Microsoft-based databases, or who use Active Server Pages (ASP) for dynamic Web sites. Unix is the best choice for most robust, reliable, and very high-traffic situations. Linux is a good choice for Unix-like reliability with lower cost, although there are a few gotchas that affect co-located servers having to do with the Linux kernel (the underlying operating system).

How much bandwidth do you need? Some virtual hosting providers tout "unlimited traffic," while burying in their fine print that they can cancel you if you use too many "system resources." The cutoff seems to be commonly anywhere from 6GB to 10GB per month before you will be canceled. Thus, most realistic hosting providers will quote specific limits on the amount of traffic allowed for your domain. So, each virtual hosting plan is usually based on a combination of storage space and data traffic.

Frankly, even 2GB is a lot of potential bandwidth. If you consider that the average file size is 10K and 100 requests for that file would only be 1MB of data transfer. Multiply this by 1000 to equal 1GB of data transfer, and you are transferring 100,000 documents. Data transfer capacity of 2GB would double that; 4GB would double that again, and so on. Basically, with virtual Web hosting you can start small and grow as your audience does. For most small businesses, you will likely never need more than 4GB of monthly data transfer.

Features
Many hosting providers use a wall of bullet points to outline the features of different plans, and many of the terms are highly confusing. Most first-time buyers of hosting services may not know a POP3 from an ODBC, from an SQL, from a MajorDomo. Since describing the merits of every one of these options would take a book, refer to the Web Hosting Glossary at the end of this article for a quick take on what all the "host speak" really means.

One feature to definitely look for is APOP E-mail support. This is the fairly new standard for secure, encrypted E-mail connection between the server and your E-mail reader (requires an E-mail reader with APOP support), and it's going to become more important as security and privacy concerns increase.

Support Services
One of the most important considerations with hosting of any kind is the level of support provided. Most hosting companies now use a ticketing system to track issues. Unfortunately, the industry average for response to support tickets currently runs one to three days for reply.

Some companies offer toll-free support, but many of these companies are currently canceling their IPOs and losing money because of the high cost of handling support calls. Big providers like Verio and Interland are bleeding money, and this should be a consideration when choosing a provider. (Disclosure: the author of this article is the president of Neotrope® Hosting, which also hosts this Website.) Telephone support is not always of any use, since many support people have no experience actually working on the machine or technology where you're experiencing a problem. This is particularly true at large, "brand name" hosting providers who have too many customers to offer truly effective telephone support. Obviously, the most technically adept folks aren't sitting there answering phone calls.

Choosing a small to medium hosting provider who gives support by E-mail and call-back, but does so promptly can be more effective than unlimited "free telephone support." Most reliable hosting providers also belong to some kind of 24-hour customer feedback monitoring service like ePublicEye.com that allows unhappy customers to publicly voice their bad experiences, as well as share positive experiences.