Web hosting servers are provided by web hosting companies to offer a suitable environment for hosting website files and making them accessible through the internet.
You basically rent the servers for a sum of money that you pay monthly or annually, and the hosting service provider does all the hosting and managing work for you.
The concept behind web hosting companies is to offer server solutions that have the best uptime, security, support, and more features that you can not hold all the time.
General Concept:
Let’s say that you want to rent a house that would store all your belongings. The first step you would need to do is find the location or the address you wish your house to be in. And the second step is the address that you want you and your visitor will use to reach the house.
Web hosting works the same, the location of your house is going to be your web hosting provider, whereas the belongings are your websites and web files. And the address is the IP address.
How do web hosting services work?
Each web hosting provider has one or more server locations named “data centers“. Each data center contains hundreds or thousands of computers named “physical servers“.
These data centers provide several features such as security, performance, backups system, and more, as well as physical security such as firefighting protocols to ensure the servers, are always functioning and your website never shuts down, and you are constantly online!
Each of these physical servers can be rented by the website owner as a whole one, or part of it according to the type of resources the website needs:
- Dedicated Physical Server: Rent the whole physical server.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS): The Physical server is divided into smaller servers called VPSs.
- Shared Hosting: The VPSs divided into smaller web hosting solutions for more than one user. Read also, Shared vs. VPS.
To put it simply, when you pick a web hosting service provider you would be renting resources in the server of that provider. The purpose of renting this space is to save all your data such as files, text, images, or videos that are going to be viewed when a user accesses your website, as well as ensure the safety of these data.
Read also: What to look for in a web hosting service.
How do web hosts serve websites?
When you decide to create a website, you will first need to sign up for web hosting and create a server based on the web hosting capabilities and the resources you need such as storage space, bandwidth, CPUs, etc.
The web host will dedicate the resources for you and provide you with an IP address for your server. You will then upload or create your website files on the server, and add the IP address to the DNS records of your domain name to point it to the server.
The hosting service gets their monthly or annual money, and you get your website live on the internet.
Read also:
Best cheap web hosting.
How Does Web Hosting Affect Website Performance?
