Intro to Web Hosting series

1. What is web hosting?

Web hosting is a very important part of the way the Internet works today. To the end user, the Internet seems to just work all by itself. Many website owners have come to learn that's not the case at all.

But what is web hosting, really?

Web hosting is a service provided by thousands of companies worldwide. They set up and maintain entire buildings called datacenters, full of computer systems called servers, and you get some sort of access to them via the Internet.

With that access you can upload your websites. Once configured properly, computers around the world will quickly know exactly where to find them.

There are several different types of web hosting providers. Odds are, if you're just starting out, you'll need a shared hosting provider for your website. With that kind of hosting, your site could be on a computer along with hundreds of others, but it is the cheapest and easiest way to get started.

Even someone tech savvy, with lots of computer experience, is sure to have many unanswered questions. We hope that most of those questions will be answered by the series of tutorials that follows.