Choosing a domain name | What is hosting? | Country codes

What is hosting?

The term "hosting" is used to refer to housing of a web site. Your computer at home is not on 24/7, and even if it is, it does not have a powerful cable or phone line that would allow million visitors to connect to your system from all over the world. Plus, you wouldn't want to deal with all the security issues resulting from people connecting to the resources on your computer. (Unless you are a Linux guru and you are running an Apache server with DNS resolution on your home system, in which case you probably don't need to read this article).

If your home system breaks, people would not be able to access your site, and you will suffer loss of visitors and sales due to this downtime. In addition, if many people connect to your home computer, your internet service provider will charge you for bandwidth use, and it adds up to be very expensive. That is why you need somebody else to be hosting your site for you.

Every computer with an internet connection can connect to all the hosting servers. A hosting server is a powerful computer that stores client's web sites and is connected to the internet with a cable that has ability to handle many incoming connections from other systems. The company that owns the server and provides hosting, makes sure that it is online 24/7 and makes sure nobody can get to your information without a login name and a password that they give you at the time of registration. Since a hosting company hosts many sites, it is cheaper for them to pay for the bandwidth, therefore, they charge you much less than the amount you would have to spend if hosting a site from your home computer.

Hosting companies also install additional packages that allow them to support different features your web site might have. For example, your hosting provider has to support a technology named "cgi" for your feedback form to work. This is something that you would not be able to do from home.

To find out more about the best hosting deals, visit our hosting section.

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Choosing a domain name | What is hosting? | Country codes