When it comes to understanding web hosting it can seem daunting. But once you understand the terminology, it becomes a lot simpler. When you’ve got the hang of the fundamentals of web hosting and how and why it works, it will become quite simple. We’ve put together a few pointers on understanding web hosting. Call it a beginner’s guide.
To first understand what web hosting is, we also need to define exactly what a website is and how it works.
What Is A Website?
There’s no doubting the importance of having a good website. A website is a location on the worldwide web (www) that houses a collection of pages and information. It can be constructed in many different ways according to personal preference. But each website has its own domain name or URL. This is the address or the link that you would type into your Internet browser to find the website.
The website can exist on this domain because the domain has been published on a remote server. In most cases, the server that hosts the domain will also be responsible for the web hosting.
These servers are like giant computers and they’re connected to the Internet all the time. This ensures that your website can be live and accessible 24 hours a day.
What Is Web Hosting?
To put it simply, web hosting provides the storage space where people and businesses can host their websites. There needs to be some kind of mapping on the Internet in order to classify where a website sits. Web hosting does this for us in exchange for a “space rental fee”.
So once a business has bought a domain, there needs to be a place to keep it. There is a fee payable in exchange for hosting the website on the domain that was purchased.
The fee covers the space that you are renting and the fees involved for keeping the server connected to the Internet and delivering your website to the world. This fee is paid to the hosting provider in exchange for their service.
Some websites, like e-commerce sites, need more storage space than others. This is something you’ll need to discuss with your website host.
What Do I Need To Be Able To Host A Website?
In order to host a website you will need your own server, or access to one. Running your own server is a costly exercise and you need to keep it at controlled temperatures so that it doesn’t overheat. A decent server also costs a lot to buy. It’ll also work out to be much more than the nominal monthly fees involved in paying a hosting provider to host your website for you.
Web Hosting Made Simple
So as you can see, understanding web hosting is not as complicated as it seems, although once you get into the types of hosting it can get a little bit more complex.
The good news is that we offer web hosting to our clients as part of our website packages and we’d be more than happy to run through these with you.