What is Hosting and Why do I Need it?
If you are new to the world of the Internet it may not be immediately obvious what hosting is and why you might need it.
More and more people are getting online now and one of the first things they do when they get online is head over to Google and search for something of interest to them.
In order for you to be able to find any of those websites that appear in the search results on Google, they need to held somewhere that all of the other computers in the world can reach.
Many newcomers to the Internet think, quite understandably, that if they create a website they just need to hold it on their home computer and somehow people will find it.
This is not the case. Although it is possible for you to download information from the Internet to your computer, that doesn’t mean that your computer is set up in such a way that everyone would be able to access it.
When you think about it, it’s good that the rest of the world can’t access your computer. In fact, we install firewall software on our computers, if we are wise, to prevent unwanted access. After all we have enough to cope with keeping Spam, viruses and all sorts of other unwanted ‘visitors’ away.
To make your website available to the world, like all of the ones that come up when you do a search on Google, you have to place it on a web server that is attached to the main Internet network.
The Internet is very well describes as a web because it consists of lots and lots of connections that stretch around the world very much like a Spiders web. In order for other people to find your website it has to be connected to this web somewhere.
The computers that are connected to this web are known as web servers.The people who own and run those servers are known as hosting companies and the service that they offer is hosting.
They are set up to provide a secure environment for your website. There are a lot of requirements to running a hosting company that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to provide. A hosting company needs to make sure that if a server goes down for any reason that it is re-started or the fault resolved.
They need to make regular back-ups of their servers to allow them to re-instate them in case of a problem and they need to keep a lot of technical staff to provide all of the necessary support.
Fortunately hosting companies take care of all of this for you so that you can get on and run your website.
