Web hosting is a service that stores your website or web application and makes it easily accessible across different devices such as desktop, mobile, and tablets. Any web application or website is typically made of many files, such as images, videos, text, and code, that you need to store on special computers called servers. The web hosting service provider maintains, configures, and runs physical servers that you can rent for your files. Web site and web application hosting services also provide additional support, such as security, website backup, and website performance, which free up your time so that you can focus on the core functions of your website.

Web hosting gives your website or web application a server (a type of machine) on the internet. On the other hand, a domain name gives your applications an address so that your users can find you. Every machine has a unique number, called an IP address. Users use this IP address to find the machine and the website or resources on that machine. IP addresses can be hard to remember; that is why domain name registries use a Domain Name System (DNS) to map IP addresses to easy-to-remember website names. These registries map the website names, which are called domain names, to the web hosting servers’ IP addresses. To visit any website, you enter its domain name into the browser. For example, the domain name for CreatoTech's website is creatotech.com. Domain name registration makes your site accessible on the World Wide Web, which requires both a web hosting service account and a registered domain name. You can choose the name (if available), but you need to pay a small fee to register it with the domain name registry. You can then link your web hosting account to your registered domain name as your official website address.

Hosting your business website on an internal server can be n an internal server can be time-consuming and expensive. Web hosting providers offer the following benefits. Performance A web hosting company that manages hardware resources for multiple websites has greater purchasing power. It invests in cutting-edge technology so that you get high-performing web servers with processing power, internal memory, and other computing resources. This improves website performance, and your visitors can load pages quickly. Reliability Web hosting service providers take away the stress of ongoing server maintenance. They perform regular system upgrades to maintain high security standards. By doing so, they free up your IT resources so that you can focus on application delivery instead of server management. Technical support Most web hosting services offer comprehensive support for troubleshooting performance issues. They also streamline website monitoring and analytics, data backup and recovery, and other similar features that make your website run more smoothly. Security and compliance Web hosting services use an end-to-end approach to secure infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures that meet all compliance requirements.

When you create an account with your web hosting provider, your provider allocates some space for your website or web application on its server. You can access and manage this space from your hosting account dashboard. You will also get access to other resources, such as random access memory (RAM), central processing unit (CPU), and bandwidth. The percentage of server resources you receive depends on the type of web hosting service you select. Choosing a web hosting plan is similar to renting an office space. The least expensive option is to lease a coworking space. As your company grows, you can expand to leasing an entire office or even an entire building. Similarly, you can start with free web hosting on a server that you share with several other websites or web applications. Eventually, you might want to upgrade to more exclusive web server access or even rent the entire server!

Most web hosting companies provide different hosting packages and plans. Your monthly web hosting cost can range from free to paid, depending on factors such as the following: Size of your website. Number of daily website visitors. Peak time website or webpage traffic. Web hosting features that you require. Before selecting a web hosting service, explore the different features that various services provide. The following are the main features generally provided. Disk space Your website will require storage space for emails, web files, images, and databases. While you are estimating your storage requirements, also consider future website growth and website traffic. Low disk space impacts user experience, so it is an important factor in the selection of a web hosting service. Bandwidth and data transfer In the web hosting industry, the terms bandwidth and data transfer are often used interchangeably. However, they are two different things. Bandwidth is the amount of data that your website can transfer to visitors at one time. Data transfer is the actual amount of data that it transfers. You can think of bandwidth as a pipe. The bigger the pipe, the more the water can pass through it. However, for various reasons, you might not use the total capacity of the pipe. Data transfer is like the actual amount of water that goes through the pipe in a given time period. Email accounts Many web hosting plans include an email account. You can link your email address to your website name. For example, if your website name is example.com, your email address will be yourname@example.com. The following are the main types of email accounts. POP3 POP3 accounts give you server space to store your emails, which you can access directly or by using your email client program. Forwarding mail Forwarding mail accounts redirect emails to another email address. This account could be a personal email account with an email service provider or a third-party account that manages your website emails for you. Aliases Some web hosts have emails plans that you can use to create several aliases or email account names without creating a full POP3 account. For example, you might want to display sales@, support@, and orders@ addresses on different pages of you website. Instead of having multiple POP3 accounts that need to be checked and administered, you could redirect everything to a single inbox. FTP access FTP refers to website file transfer and sharing. Many websites have documents, such as PDF files or image files, that they want internet users to download. The web hosting company uses FTP access to provide this service.