What exactly is web hosting? If you’re asking yourself or someone else this question, then you’re probably looking into building your own website. On the off chance you’re NOT someone interested in building your own website – hi! Thanks for stopping by!
In the web design world, there’s a lot of different terms that are used frequently and without second thought. These phrases can sometimes be overwhelming to those who don’t actively build websites for a living. Us nerds tend to forget that most people don’t spend 10+ hours a day in front of their computer 😊 I digress…
So back to the topic at hand, web hosting. Web hosting in short is almost exactly what it sounds like – a host for your website. With everything being online or in the cloud nowadays it’s easy to think that websites are just floating in the sky somewhere but that’s not exactly the case. Just like you have documents and pictures stored directly on your computer, every website is stored somewhere. And while some websites actually are hosted/stored on a physical computer somewhere, the majority of websites are hosted using an online service.
Web hosts such as GoDaddy, store your website on their servers that you never even have to interact with. Web hosting allows you to interact with your website and display it for the public. You know when you type in google.com and it brings up Google’s website? That’s because google.com is setup to display a website that is hosted somewhere. If Google did not have web hosting, google.com would go nowhere. It would give you a 404, ‘Not Found’ error.
You could also look at web hosting as a sort of bucket. If we’re using my website as an example, when you type in Rebekahpainter.com the WWW (World Wide Web) knows that my web host is GoDaddy, so it goes to GoDaddy, finds the correct bucket, and presents the corresponding information (my website!).
So to recap: web hosting is just the location where your website (and all of the documents, pictures, text, and anything else on your website) is stored.
A great web host you can use is GoDaddy. I would recommend either one of the web hosting or WordPress hosting plans for those looking to start up a new website.
If you still have any questions about the above, feel free to reach out! I would LOVE to help you either build a new website, edit your current website or just to give you advice!