Beginners guide to Web Hosting

What is Hosting? Part 1 of a beginners guide to web hosting

If you are already familiar with the concept of hosting, please skip onto the next page:

A web server is a computer that is always switched on and connected to the internet. This computer holds one or more web pages and can be found by typing in a domain name (such as www.wighthat.com). When somebody such as yourself requests a page on this site, your computer uses various internet systems (which will be explained in more detail later) to find the appropriate web server and the server pulls the page out of its memory (a hard disk probably) and sends it to your machine.

People that have a web site have two choices; to set up their own server, configure it and leave it on and connected to the internet so that people requesting the site can access it day and night or, much more easily, get another company to “host” the site for them (stick it on their machine). This is essentially what hosting is. There are many different combinations of features of the machines, the connections and the service and a range of costing to go with this from free hosting upwards. We will discuss these various issues in the next couple of pages.

Next section: Bandwidth, memory allocation and network speed

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