What is web hosting?

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