subject: What Is Web Hosting For Beginners [print this page] A World Wide Hosting service allows people or organizations to publish content on one's own part of the world wide web. The hosting service provider charges a, usually, every month fee or show some ads on each page to finance its activity. The world wide web pages are stored on computers called servers.
A World Wide Hosting service is something you look for after you have set up your broadband connection to the world wide web. You'll require a web connection to deliver your content to the hosting service. Your content will mostly be HTML-files, but you can publish anything that can be distributed digitally. A lovely sign of quality in a hosting provider is that tyhey provide lots of information to help you publish your content, even before you pay for their services.
The potentially dynamic content published on a website is reached by entering a URL in to the address field of a web browser such as IE of Firefox. The URL is a matchless resource locator & as such a given URL will always point to the same content. There's exceptions to this rule, but at least it is the owner of the URL that decides what content to show for each URL. It is up to the world wide web browser to render the published content in a way that makes sense for the current user.
The first part of a URL, the part that usually is a company name, is called the domain name. To have lovely looking URL's you require to buy the domain name you require before you engage a hosting service provider. Most web hosts also sell domains so you might buy your own domain name as part of the sign up process at the hosting service.
For your web browser to find the server that hosts the pages you prefer to see, it makes use of a network of servers around the globe to look up the domain part of the URL. This network is called the DNS. When you buy a domain name it's to be propagated trough all of the DNS servers spanning the globe. That might take a couple of days, so don't be afraid if your site is not visible to you immediately.
The hosting provider will serve web pages twenty-four hoursa day, five days a week & all year round. It is of vital interest to you to find out how often & for how long the world wide web service provider may go offline. Most web host providers have a "uptime" guarantee of 98-99%.
A sizable issue with cheap hosting services is that they oversell their capacity. Even the expensive web hosts oversell but not as much. They get away with this because they count on the fact that a tiny part of their customers are going to have popular sites & or lots of space demanding content.
