An Internet service provider (ISP) is the company that enables you to get on the Internet (via DSL, cable, satellite, and so on); a web hosting provider manages space on the Internet for storing and accessing websites and other files.
This distinction oft en gets blurred in people’s minds because ISPs also offer varying levels of hosting services. In particular, ISPs provide e-mail hosting, and for many people the e-mail account they get from their ISP is the only one they have. It’s very common for an ISP to also provide free or low cost web hosting when you sign up, although this isn’t always well publicized.
ISP hosting:
Web hosting accounts from ISPs generally are meant for personal web space. They have web addresses (URLs) such as http://members.your provider.com/yourname and typically don’t have features that a business
website needs: databases, large amounts of storage space, handling large numbers of visitors, or the ability to use your own domain name. In fact ISP hosting accounts can be very restrictive.
Even when an ISP does off er useful business features, you need to assess its support for hosting services, online hosting interface, and all the other questions about hosting being raised in this chapter. There’s
a lot to being an ISP and supporting that side of the business: Do they have the resources to adequately support hosting as well?
The other important consideration is search engine visibility. If you host your site with your ISP and use its domain name, and then a year down the road you want more features, get your own domain, and move
to a web hosting provider, links to your site will no longer work and any search engine ranking you’ve built up will be lost because your web address will have changed.
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