What is Web Hosting? An introduction for beginners

Web Hosting is a service that enables you to upload and store a site’s HTML documents and their relative files to a web-server. This allows the files to make it available on the World Wide Web and hence permits the public to view them via a web browser.

Web Hosting is often closely associated with domain names, but goes a lot further. The World Wide Web is a massive collection of web-sites with sites being hosted on computers called web-servers all over the world. Because of its uniquely global nature, a web site is accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. One can pay to have a 24/7 dedicated Internet connection to an in-house webserver but many people decide to host their sites with a web hosting provider. Web hosting clients simply upload their web sites to a shared or dedicated web-server, which ISP maintains to ensure a constant, fast connection to the Internet.

A web-server is a special computer where documents are stored and made available to the rest of the world. The complicated web of servers consists of computer systems installed with special web-server software and connected to the Internet. The process of operating and maintaining one of these web-servers is called Web Hosting.