What is web hosting?

The Internet is made up of a large network of single computers all connected together. Every website you visit is hosted on a computer someplace in the world. Usually these web sites are hosted on what is known as a server. A server is nothing more than a larger, stronger and more powerful personal computer, with special capabilities built in (like redundant power supplies and back-up hard drives). These web servers are commonly called “hosts”. Though not required, generally these “hosts” are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day by at least one high speed dedicated connection. The main purpose of these “hosts” are to serve html pages (web pages). A web page normally consists of text, graphics and links to other pages. So in english web site hosting is nothing more than placing your web pages on one of these servers.