What is Website Hosting?

What is Website Hosting?

Website hosting is like renting a house. You pay money for your website to 'live' inside a web host's server (your rental property). Your domain name is not your website hosting, but rather the number on your website's letterbox within your web host's server. Just like renting a house, if you don't keep up to date with the hosting fees, your website can no longer be visited by people (you get evicted). This can happen even if you own your domain name, as that is simply the address (or number on the letter box) of your website, not the property itself.

Understanding More About Website Hosting

Website hosting is a service offered by web hosts (like us) which lets you put your website on the internet. You pay us to rent space on our server (which is like a computer connected to the internet). We store your website files on our servers, link them to your domain name. When people want to visit your website, we show them it (we let them get past the letter box and into the lounge of your property). What we don't let them see though, is the private backend or CMS of your website (your property's bedroom) - only the front, like you're seeing now. When you pay to host your website with us, it takes up a tiny spot in our servers, meaning there are many other sites also stored in the same servers.

Let's break it down another way:

  • you have a domain name, but no hosting. This is like having a letter box, but no house. You can give visitors your address, but once they get there, they can't come in.
  • you have hosting, but no domain name. You can live in a fabulous house, but you don't have an address to give to people, so no one can visit.
  • you have hosting and a domain name. People can find and visit your house - everything is awesome!

It's up to you to choose the right website hosting package for your website. Our hosting packages come in a range of prices, with each one allowing your website to have a set number of visitors, orders, bookings and email addresses to use per month. Generally speaking, the more traffic you get to your site and the bigger your site is, the more space it uses up in our server. Your website then takes up a bigger space, so we charge more rent to host it.

What Does a Web Host Do?

Website World are a web host. This means that all the files, wording, design and images associated with your website are stored on our server. When someone enters your domain name in a web browser (or clicks on the link to it on a search engine results page), we will send all the front end information of your site back to their browser so they can visit your website. We also provide at least one email mailbox with each of our web hosting packages too.

As a web host, it's our job to keep your website online and secure 24/7. To do this we ensure our servers are well maintained and running at all times. We also keep our servers working quickly, which lets us show your website to your visitors in a matter of moments, rather than making them wait for it to load.

Your next step in learning more about hosting is to visit our Web Hosting Fees & Information page. If you still have questions, don't forget you can send us an email too!

Tags: web hosting  

Posted: Thursday 23 August 2018