No doubt you have heard about hosting and all the buzz words that hover around it like storage, bandwidth, data centers etc. But what exactly is hosting and how does it work?

Well, very simply, hosting involves placing your website on a computer that is connected to the internet so that other internet users can access your website. Thats it.

Let's use an example...

Think of a grocery store front: if you want people to buy your products, you have to rent shop space where you store and display your stock, and people can physically come in and shop. Well its the same with your website. When a website is developed, all sorts of digital data is created, such as HTML code, images, links and textual information, and all of this data has to be stored somewhere if you want to make your website available to an online visitor.

As a general rule, hosting companies will provide this service for you. A typical hosting company will have anywhere from tens to hundreds of servers (very powerful computers) that are specifically designed for hosting websites, and these servers are stored in a secure fire-safe building, normally called a data-centre.

A data-centre will also have a very fast, dedicated internet connection with which to "serve" internet data to the world wide web and when your website is stored or hosted on their servers, the data-centre generally guarantees you that your website will be online or that your "up-time" will be 98%. This means that they have engineers 24 hours a day checking up on your website and the server it is on, to make sure that it doesn't ever go down.

Usually, when you decide to work with a design team, they will recommend that you host with them. This means that your design team actually has a contract with a hosting company and that your website will be hosted by this hosting company.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Firstly: a little more about what hosting services provide, and what you are likely to need for hosting your website.

Click on the 'Next' button below which will start the lesson, What Do You Need? - Part 1 or you can navigate through the sub-topic navigation on the top right of the site to fast track to topics of interest.