Web hosting
Renting space on an always-on computer so your website is reachable by anyone.
Web hosting is the service of keeping a website's files and programs on a server that is connected to the internet day and night. You could run a site from your own laptop, but it would vanish whenever the laptop slept or the Wi-Fi dropped. A hosting provider rents you space on machines in a data center with stable power, fast connections and people watching them.
Hosting comes in several sizes. Shared hosting puts many small sites on one server, which is cheap and simple. A virtual private server (VPS) gives you your own slice of a machine to configure. Cloud platforms let you rent exactly the computing you use and grow when traffic spikes. Static hosting serves plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, often through a CDN, and is ideal for blogs, portfolios and documentation.
Hosting is separate from the domain name. The domain is the address people type; the hosting is the place where the site actually lives. You connect them by pointing the domain's DNS records at the host. Many companies sell both together, but you can keep them apart and move your site to another host without changing its address.
Keep in mind
- Keeps a website on servers that are always on and online.
- Options range from cheap shared hosting to VPS and full cloud platforms.
- Domain and hosting are different things, connected through DNS.
- Static sites can be hosted very cheaply, often through a CDN.
