What is “Web Hosting” And How Does It Work

Filed under: Web — Benjamin @ 4:45 pm on July 21st, 2008

I know I have written about various sites that can help you out regarding webhosting, but really, now I’m here to explain it to you. If you travel the internet as a casual user it probably doesn’t pop-out at you. But if your a webmaster, or a future webmaster knowing things like how exactly does your computer connect to the internet, can be helpful. So lets start. Now usually web hosting can be complex, but I’ll make it simple. A company, your web hosting company, runs a set of computers all day, all night, all year… they run constantly. These are servers and they are given IP numbers so they they can be found by computers on the internet. So considering a server is pretty much a computer its where the website is, it holds everything. Every photo you’ve ever uploaded, every blog entry you’ve written, and it even holds things like the HTML theme, the CSS template, Javascripts and more. Now to get to that website you type in the URL (uniform resource locator) into your browser and when you press enter it doesn’t just “poof” there but it sends a request throughout the internet looking for this site. This process happens all in a matter of seconds. If the server is found, your browser will start to download the site so that you can view it. Now from a webmaster standpoint its usually cheaper and easier to just get a space in a shared server, or s server used by multiple people. But some feel its necessary to get dedicated server hosting. This is basically a non-shared server… one person owns it and has the choices including what Operating System to run on it, and its hardware specifications. Some feel this is a better route to take, but some would prefer shared hosting. So there it is… if you don’t run a site but have always wondered how your computer gets to one, here it is. Cheers!

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