A Basic Guide to Web Hosting
There are two parts to creating a web page, or a series of web pages (a website).
- You need to write the page
- You then need to publish it
Web hosting is the service that allows organizations and individuals to publish a website or web page on the internet.
There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that. It is, after all, a massive industry with hundreds of millions of websites online at any one time. And, if you type in the words "web hosting", or "website hosting", you will find a whole bunch of competing companies offering to host your website.
Typically, the web pages you have made will be stored on a computer server. In hosting terms, this is called a “web server”. When someone types in the name of your website on a computer, the web connects to the web server, which then delivers the web pages back to that individual, who can then browse through the pages of your website.
The web hosting company provides anything to do with these transactions, such as running the servers, providing hosting software, security, bandwidth, disk space and speed.
So why can't I do this myself?
The answer is, you could do it for yourself. You could get your own dedicated IP address at home and host your site on your own computer, but there is a big "however" to this idea. Web servers are typically stored in data centres, which are dedicated to keeping things running smoothly. Their internet connections both incoming and outgoing are typically much faster and better designed than a home-based server and they work hard to ensure that their servers never go down and are there waiting to serve your web pages at any time.
