Firstly Welcome to Web Hosting Pro,
The goal of Web Hosting is to educate and assist South Africans and anyone else with website hosting, domain registration, website design, search engine optimization and much much more. I would like to describe it as my online platform to connect and help people with all the above mentioned topics, and of course much more than that. For more about me please check out the About Daniel Hall page.
This is my first post on this blog and I feel that I should start with the obvious namely Web Hosting Basics, so the question I am asking is:
In a nutshell the explanation of web hosting is the renting of space and of services which are based on a powerful computer called a server or a web server, which is connected to the internet. This is managed by a web hosting company. Without web hosting you will be unable to have a website, its as simple as that.
The company that offers up this server or web server is called a web host or a hosting company, of which there are many to choose from. By uploading your website files to the web hosting server your website should be available to visit by anyone around the world with an internet connection at any time of the day or night.
So tell us more about this computer called a server? I guess you could imagine this as a supercharged desktop PC which is therefore capable of handling many, many users at any one time. A web hosting company may have hundreds of these servers, so you can imagine the capacity is absolutely huge! Each server will have an individual name which is called the nameserver. Note down the details of the nameserver for future reference.
Your website is hosted upon this server even though you are actually building it via your own computer and connection to the internet. But the important thing is to realize that even if you were to make your website without an internet connection to your computer, you will still have to make it “live” by hosting it on one of these servers. With me so far?
This process of moving your website from your computer to the server is called uploading. So basically you are uploading files of information to the server.
Now, you can connect to the web server from your computer (or any computer with a connection to the internet) via some software which is called ftp or file transfer protocol. This then forms a connection between your computer and the server. You can see the files on your server in your account by using the ftp software and you can transfer any files to and from the account as you so wish. Its simply a matter of dragging and dropping files with your computer mouse to transfer them.
Very simply, this is what web hosting is all about. Renting a small piece of space on a server computer, creating a website to upload on the server. This is just a brief explanation of web hosting, and there is more to it, especially the need to purchase and own a domain name which acts as the address of the website and relates to the server space you rent.
Don’t worry, an explanation of domain names will be explained in the next Web Hosting Basics post, so watch this space and stay in touch.
Daniel Hall
Stallion Hosting – You Can Bet On Us!
