Internet Hosting for Newbies

Basically, internet hosting is a service that is provided to the public, which allows you to publish a website to the internet. It is like a storage space for your website -- kind of like renting out a building for a store. The internet, also known as the information superhighway is millions of computers networked and connected with each other that you can access data from. These computers that make up the internet are called servers. A server can be simple like the computer that you currently have on your desk, or it can be hundreds of racks that are complex that fill up entire rooms and buildings. Most of the time people purchase internet hosting from an ISP (Internet Service Provider) instead of hosting their web page on their own PC.

An internet service provider is a company that has a very large connection to the internet. They then sell that connection to the public. Usually you will see an ISP having T1 or multiple T1 access which is a digital stream that data is transferred through. What internet hosting does, is sell you time on that digital stream which is called bandwidth. Bandwidth is the number of bytes of data that will be transferred from your website to its visitors' computers and browsers. Some internet service providers offer a shared web hosting which is cheaper and lets several users share the stream as well as space on the server. Of course each one is sectioned off for security purposes.

The second part of getting internet hosting is buying storage space. Every server has a maximum amount of hard drive space, exactly like your own computer. A popular hard drive capacity is 200 GB of space. That means that a 200 GB hard drive can store 200 billion bytes of information (200 Gigabytes).

To visualize what this might mean, think about this: One character typed into your word processing program typically equals one byte. The servers which make up the entire internet stores data on huge hard drives that are measured in terabytes which is one trillion bytes! With internet hosting, you are purchasing a piece of that storage space on the server to upload your website to. Most of the time, people choose the shared web hosting because getting a dedicated server can be quite costly.

And the third aspect of internet hosting is email boxes. There will be a set number of email boxes that are put aside for you to use. These email boxes can be thought of as mail slots or mailboxes and they are where you will receive and at other times store all the messages that you get. Each one would be assigned to a name for example "johndoe@doeandfriends.com." The first part is the name of the individual and the part after the "@" symbol is the website where the email box is located.

These are the basics of what the internet hosting entails.