What is Web Hosting?

There are essentially two main parts to serving a website online – the domain name and the hosting environment. When someone visits your website, your website and all its elements (html files, images, text, etc) need to be “served” to the user from a high-powered computer somewhere. We call this a “server”, which is often located in a datacenter (a big building of servers). You are essentially renting space on a high-powered computer where your website files are stored – and “served” to someone anytime they visit the website. This is ‘web hosting’. When you purchase a new domain name (such as www.example.com), it needs to be configured in a way so that when someone types it in their address bar, it directs them to the hosting environment where your website files are located. Likewise, the hosting package needs to be configured in a way that it knows to receive traffic from your domain name (www.example.com).