The Internet is a different medium from others like print and TV, which allow limited participation for users and no empowerment at all. The Internet allows any individual to broadcast his or her opinion and conduct transactions with another entity. A website is a page stored in a drive that can be accessed through the Internet. An individual or entity can use one’s own dedicated website or use other sites for promotion.

Web hosting is a term that describes a process in which a company rents space in its drive to host the web pages of its clients. The dotcom burst was preceded by a mad rush to start websites for any sort of business without strong fundamentals. The dotcom v.2 has matured with the upgrade of user-friendly technology and e-commerce. This is illustrated by the number of registrations in Canada after 2002.

The Canadian web hosting market is dominated by number of players providing a host of services such as domain name registration, disk space, and bandwidth. Besides, they provide email accounts, data transfer, mySQL database, and other applications. The web hosts could be parent hosts, resellers, free hosts, and cheap hosts.

To host a site, the companies charge fees starting at $5 CAD/month and domains for $10 CAD/year. The services usually come in plans with many features. The services include support twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, reliability features as a money-back guarantee, and guaranteed uptime.

A web hosting service is to be decided based on the purpose of website. A website for individual purpose may not certain e-commerce features; businesses may need multiple email accounts, and risk-management services such as spam, virus protection, and data backup.

A good host can be decided by the speed of other customers’ websites and the number of complaints vs. benefits. Although it is cheap to host from anywhere, it is better to have a host server from the region where the customers are located so that the there are no delays in downloads and page visits.