Web Hosting – Do You Need It to Have a Website?

Yes you do. If you want to build own website or write a blog and have it appear online you will need web hosting. Here we can look at all the components necessary for setting up new web hosting. There are a few different points we will cover including: what does it mean when people talk about web hosting? What is it in regards to the internet? Is there a cost involved? And the many other components that are needed to host a website successfully.

When people refer to web hosting they are talking about the physical computer that you need to upload your files to for them to be visible online as a webpage. There are web hosting companies that own these computers. The computers are hooked up to the internet 24/7. They are called servers. Like other computers the servers have an IP number or address that allows other computers to find them. The IP address is how computers find each other online. The servers are where your webpage files are stored. When someone types in your website address the computer knows to go to the server where your web pages are hosted.

A company that does hosting will incur costs to perform this service. They have to buy the computers, rent space to house them, bandwidth, connections and people to maintain them. Luckily for us web hosting is very competitive so you can probably find it for less then $15/month.

Understanding what web hosting is by definition isn’t that difficult. Figuring out how it fits into the whole scheme of having a live webpage is not so straight forward. There are many parts to getting a web page up and running and the hosting is just a part of the whole. The first thing you need to do is buy the hosting as well as purchase a domain name. Purchasing a domain name is quite simple and only costs between $5 and $10 dollars per year. Go Daddy is very reasonably priced. The host and the domain have to be able to communicate online. To set the connection you go into the settings of the domain provider and set the DNS (domain nameservers) to point to your host. The host will have the information you need to enter into the domain settings. This is like exchanging phone numbers, they just have to be able to communicate. This connection can take about 48 hrs sometimes much sooner. If you do these two things first you will have time to build your pages for your website.

I hope this helps people understand what web hosting entails. When I first started trying to get web pages online I didn’t understand the difference between the domain and the host or how they related to each other. Now that I understand how web hosting works and why I need it, I have been able to build a blog and get a couple of affiliate websites up and running. It’s amazing how easy something is if some body shows you the ropes.