What is Hosting?

Every website needs a ❛home❜, a place where its files are accessible anytime, anywhere. That's what hosting is. It's a plot of Internet land where a website lives.

What exactly is website hosting?
Every website you've ever visited is hosted on a server somewhere in the world. Hosting is the invisible foundation of the Internet. Every website needs a ❛home❜, a place where its files are accessible anytime, anywhere by people surfing the Internet. That's what hosting does. It's a plot of Internet land where a website lives. If you want a website, it will need to be hosted somewhere on the World Wide Web. In a nutshell, web hosting is the process of renting or buying space to house a website on the World Wide Web. Website content has to be housed on a server connected to the Internet to be viewable online. A web host is a company that owns and maintains those servers and essentially rents out space on them for people to store their websites. When a hosting provider allocates space on a web server for a website to store its files, this is called ❛hosting.❜ Web hosting makes the files that comprise a website (HTML, CSS, images, etc.) available for viewing online. Businesses who provide hosting services range in price from approximately $10-$100+ per month depending on how much space your website needs for its content. Additional costs can apply for other optional services hosting businesses offer. All MyWebsiteNZ.com sites are hosted by RADAR Network Services.

What is a web server?
A web server is a computer that connects other web users to your site from anywhere in the world. As the name implies, web hosting service providers have the servers, connectivity, and associated services to host websites from small blogs to large organisations. To have an online presence, reliable web hosting is essential. The most important aspects visitors prefer on a site is one that works correctly and one that can deliver what they are looking for, seamlessly, and not least, with high-speed Internet. In the world of the Internet, hosting is the essential foundation. You wouldn't be able to read this if this website wasn't hosted on a server connected to the World Wide Web.

Web server ❝uptime❞ explained...
RADAR Network Services hosting has strong uptime rates and will work hard to keep your website available to visitors 24/7 with minimal downtime. All hosts need to undertake scheduled maintenance on their servers, eg security updates. However, this should cause minimal disruption to your site as this is carried out between the hours of 2am and 5am once or twice a month, the duration of which is no longer than 30 minutes. Since web pages can't keep customers if they are down, a generous uptime is extremely important. In the event an unexpected outage occurs, RADAR Network Services will remedy the situation as soon as possible.

What does your browser do?
Your computer's browser sends a request to the website's server for something — maybe a page, a document, a gallery of photos, a file for running an application. The URL (website address) you put into the bar at the top of the browser window is the main portion of that request and it tells your browser where the piece of Internet land is on the World Wide Web where a site lives. The web server receives the request and pulls together whatever it needs to deliver back to you what you requested. This might be a file, an image, a page, etc. The web server responds to the request with the content you want, eg shopping page, shopping cart if you have added a product to the shopping cart, gallery page, etc. If you click on a menu item, your browser shows that content to you. That is the ❛basic process❜ of how a website works.

What actually is a website?
To understand where a website is located, it's helpful to understand what it is. A website is a collection of documents or pages. Every page is a file in a public-facing (what you see on your screen) directory (folder). When you look at a website, your computer is literally downloading the file and showing it to you. Web applications, eg Google, Facebook, and any online galleries you might view are all examples of web applications. Much like apps you run on your phone or tablet, the files for the app have to exist somewhere. With web apps, they sit on a public-facing web server the same way documents and files sit on your computer, laptop, tablet. Your browser downloads the files and runs them, and there is constant communication between your computer and the web server. A good example is to look upon your website as a filing cabinet full of folders and files and photos, etc. Your boss asks you to locate a specific document about a specific person in the organisation. Upon that request you open the filing cabinet, go to the folder that you may have created for all staff members and inside that folder is another folder that stores information about that particular staff member, ie salary, etc. You take that folder out (or just a file in the folder) and show it to your boss. That is an example of the job your browser does for you when you visit a website.