What is Web Hosting?

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a service which allocates space for customers to display their websites on computer servers that are connected to the Internet 24/7.

Servers are powerful computers that have extremely large hard drives, or an array of hard drives. Space is then rented to those who want a “website presence” on the Internet.
Every server on the Internet has a unique numerical IP (Internet Protocol) address. You can think of servers as apartment buildings with unique addresses. Each apartment unit within each building is equivocal to space rented out for individual websites. And like real apartment buildings, each unit also has an address based on “the building” in which it is located.
When you rent a space on a server then, you are setting up house on the Internet. You can be reached by a unique address (the website address), which is based on the server’s address.

More simply put — to get your website onto the internet, you will need to find some reliable web hosting. Remember, a web host is a company that has computers that are hooked up to the internet 24/7. These computers are called servers and they are assigned IP numbers in order that they may be found by other computers hooked up to the internet. It is on these servers that all your web files are stored, be they HTML files (web pages), graphic files, CSS files, JavaScript´s, etc.

Basically what happens is when you type a web address into the address bar of your browser and then hit Go, your browser sends out a request to ‘get’ that web page. The request travels across the internet to the appropriate web server and attempts to locate the web page on that server. If the request is successful (web page exists) then that web page will load (or download) into your web browser.

These web hosting servers that store and serve up web pages to the internet cost money to set up, configure and maintain and thus web hosting providers that own these servers typically charge you a monthly or yearly fee to, at the very least:

1. Allow you to save your web files to their web server (called uploading)
2. Perpetually be ready to serve them up to the internet (make available for downloading)

Web hosting has become a competitive business and, in order to entice more customers to sign up with them, web hosts offer all kinds of bells and whistles to the deals or web hosting packages they make available.