Intro to Website Hosting

Website Hosting

Every website needs a web service called website hosting. It is often one of many web services provided by hosting companies.

Here is an explanation of how this works. When you have a website built, it is made up of many files and folders all contained together at a specific location on a hard drive of a large computer called a server. These files and folders all interact with each other based on the website code the programmer used to build the website. If you have access to the files for your website on that server, you can view the website, view pages of content including seeing pictures and images, reading the text, and even navigating to any of the other pages, etc. It is a total functioning website, except you are the only one that can view your website.

So why is that you may ask?

In order for the server to make your website accessible to anyone connected to the World Wide Web the server needs to be configured as a “nameserver”. Nameservers are part of a large database called the Domain Name System (DNS), which acts like a directory for devices and the IP addresses attached to them. Put simply, nameservers helps browsers make connections between URLs and websites.

Most businesses want their website to be accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web and will use a company that already has nameservers in place. In order for the website files and folders to be transferred to the name server, the website owner will need to pay a fee for the space it will take on the name server. There are a number of other functions and services that are happening for the website to interact with a viewer, but we won’t go into that here. The essence of using the nameserver provided by another party is why it is called website hosting.