How Does Hosting Work?

 Web hosting is a service that will take web pages or HTML you’ve created and display them to whomever requests it. Think of them as publishers for the book you’ve written. You can write the best story in the world, but keeping it on your desk won’t let others see it. That’s where a web host comes in.

A web hosting provider will have servers available to host your pages and provide space for them to reside. The web hosting provider has a very large, constant connection to the Internet. Whenever visitors want to read your content, it’s available and ready to go. You don’t need to be awake or even have your computer turned on - that’s basic idea behind web hosting.

For a web host to work it needs a few things, one of which is a name. Computers work on numbers called I.P. addresses - strings of specific combinations that each computer has. These addresses are stored in database system called DNS or Domain Name System. The DNS translates the many millions of computer addresses into human-readable names. An example: www.google.com translates to 74.125.67.100 among many others. Having a name like google.com allows humans to easily remember where to go when searching, but computers need the DNS to know what specific computer you’re referring to.

On your end you need to come up with a name. Some web hosting providers can give you a name based on your account name or something general, but is that what you need? If you’re building a store a general name looks unprofessional and just a bit cheesy. On the other hand, a general name for your personal blog probably wouldn’t matter. If you want to choose a name that’s unique to you and your content, your web hosting provider should be able to provide the tools you need for that. Generally, they have a special search interface that will let you know if the names already been chosen or not.

Web hosting providers specialize in taking names humans come up with and putting them to websites. You have www.internet.com as a name? If you build some web pages for your website and have a name for it, the next step would be to find a web hosting provider. In our book example you have the novel and a name for it - time to get a publisher!