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 whole idea is that a hosting company gives you servers with solid uptime, security, support and other features that would be hard and expensive to run on your own.
General Concept:
Let’s say you want to rent a house to store all your belongings. First you pick where the house will be. Then you need an address that you and your visitors can use to find it.
Web hosting works the same way. The house is the server space you rent from your hosting provider, and the belongings are your website files. The address is your server’s IP address, and your domain name is the easy-to-remember name that points to it.
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 things like security, performance, backup systems and more, plus physical protection such as backup power, cooling and fire suppression. All of that is there to keep the servers running and your website online as much as possible.
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: One server (physical or virtual) is shared by many users, and each one gets a slice of its resources. Read also, Shared vs. VPS.
To put it simply, when you pick a web hosting provider, you’re renting resources on that provider’s servers. That space holds all your data (files, text, images and videos) that visitors see when they open your website, and the host is responsible for keeping it safe and available.
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 sets aside the resources for you and gives you an IP address for your server. You then upload or create your website files on the server and point your domain name to it, either by adding the IP address to your domain’s DNS records (an A record) or by switching to the nameservers your host gives you.
From then on, when someone types your domain, their browser looks up the IP address through DNS, connects to your host’s server, and the server sends back your pages. The host gets its monthly or yearly fee, and you get your website live on the internet.
Read also:
Best cheap web hosting.
How Does Web Hosting Affect Website Performance?
