Summary: What is web hosting answers the question of where the websites live and some interesting facts. Did you know....

What is web hosting, you ask. Well, with upwards of 200 million web sites worldwide (and counting), did you ever stop to think where all these sites are located, and located safely and securely, at that? 

What of the vast bulk of web sites belonging to companies and individuals – where do their sites live? Certainly, at the top end you have the web sites of banks and governments, with their data and systems located in duplicated high-security bomb-proof datacentres. 

Could you host a site at home?

At the low end, maybe a few technical people still host their websites in their home office. (never met one!) This, though, is increasingly unusual as the typical web hosting company will provide a secure technical home for a website at an economic cost, and this is where most sites, today, live – that is, are ‘hosted’. That, in a nutshell, is web-hosting. There’s much more, though, and the logic is obvious as you dig deeper into ‘what is web hosting’.

There is a wide range of offers and levels of service to be compared between web hosting companies.

Website Infrastructure

The full-service web and domain hosting company will make it easy and quick for the aspiring website owner to buy a domain name and have their website infrastructure up and available as quickly as possible - maybe in as little as fifteen minutes – a one-stop shop for affordable website hosting. After all, someone starting a new business or website doesn’t want to lose time on technicalities – they want their new site up and operating as soon as possible, getting traffic over reliable connections and with high up-time, earning money twenty four hours a day. 

Quickest of Loading Times

The best web hosting companies will have a good domain name search-and-buy online-store, quick and easy set-up, with high availability (well over 99%) secure sites (both from a data perspective and physically) which have high bandwidth pipes into the major internet switching centres. This ensures that a someone who has signed up for their web hosting service can be pretty certain that the site will be available 24 x 7 with the quickest of loading times for a user (all other things being equal).

You’ve heard the phrase ‘the web is a great leveller’ – that’s a great feature for a new or growing business with bigger competitors, but it’s death if you are being levelled down, with your site running slowly and your visitors bouncing out quickly with frustration, unlikely to return. Your competitors will eat you, and the web hosting company will eventually fail.

If you want Ten or a Hundred Sites 

What is web hosting – is there more? Yes, definitely. If you want ten sites (and that’s far from unusual), then the challenges of DIY would multiply. Today, though, it’s easy. Web and domain hosting has advanced to being almost a utility service. Whether you have one site or one hundred, you can increase your number of sites easily – there’s a big server-farm and full time staff at the hosting company to take the load with backups, firewalls and tech support. 

Looking for Lowest-Cost Start-Up

Then, if you are looking for lowest-cost start-up then you can share an IP address; many customers, though, want a dedicated IP address – that’s easy too, but will cost a little more. Increasing the bandwidth, data storage, number of databases, and so on, would be a challenge for a small self-hosted business, but scalability is seamless, smooth and economic with a good hosting company.

Click:  hosting definition  - to teach you the different choices you have.

Cradle-to-Grave Home for a WebsiteOften  

So, when you ask ‘what is web hosting?’, the answer is that, with the best companies, it should a cradle-to-grave home for a website, with an easy birth for the web domain hosting, smooth technical growth and ongoing low-cost care and maintenance for the site as its traffic volumes grow.

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Interesting factoids for fun 

and did you know hosting knowledge.