Web hosting is the service provided by businesses that run and maintain the physical servers all websites live on. If that sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, let’s back up and explain further. 

For as much as we talk about the internet as though it exists in the ether—using words like ”cyberspace” and “the cloud”—in fact, the internet has a physical existence as well. Every website is made up of a collection of files and software.

As a website visitor, you see a finished product and don’t necessarily think about all the little pieces it’s made up of. But once you’re the one behind the website, it becomes clear how many different parts go into the whole. 

All those files have to live somewhere. Web hosting companies own warehouses full of powerful web servers that store all the components that make up the different websites their customers run. Those servers both provide the space needed for file storage, and the mechanism for making those files accessible to other viewers when someone clicks on a link to your website or types the URL into their browser.

Website hosting is one of those things that happen in the background. For anyone that simply browses the web and goes to sites as a visitor, there’s no reason to ever know or think about it. It’s only the people that run websites or work in an industry that requires understanding how the web works that a knowledge of web hosting comes into play. 

For website owners, if you choose the right web hosting provider and plan, web hosting isn’t something you’ll have to think about much on a day-to-day basis. As long as you keep your account up to date, your web host should work seamlessly in the background and keep your website working for every visitor who wants to see it.

How Does Web Hosting Work?
A web hosting plan will provide at least four basic things:  

1. File storage
As mentioned, every website is made up of a lot of different files. Even basic websites will consist of at least dozens of image, text, and design files that all work together to make your website look the way it does.

2. Hardware
You know what the virtual side of the internet looks like—the wide array of websites you browse and visit on a regular basis. But you probably haven’t ever thought about what the physical side of the internet looks like: data centers full of physical web servers. 

This is another part of the service that web hosting providers offer. They invest in the real estate needed to house all those physical servers. They keep them in the right temperature-controlled conditions. And they hire people skilled in maintaining them to keep them consistently working at the level required to provide a good experience to your visitors. 

3. Uptime
You don’t want guests to drop by and find that your website is unavailable because your web host’s server is down. That creates a bad experience for them, and presents the risk that they won’t ever try to come back. In the web hosting industry, the amount of time your site files are available to visitors is called uptime

Many web hosting providers will encounter some lag in uptime, when a server isn’t working at full capacity for some reason. But reputable providers keep that downtime to a minimum. The industry standard for uptime is 99.9%. A good web hosting provider will promise at least that. 

4. Security
On the internet, pranksters and criminals are always trying to break into servers, files, and sites to cause mayhem or steal data. Your web host’s security measures protect your site from break-ins, just like your home security system keeps people from breaking into your house. 

Security is important for any website, but essential for business and ecommerce websites. If a business becomes associated with a data breach, it will hurt your reputation and lose you the trust of customers. And the problem is only compounded for ecommerce businesses that collect sensitive data from customers through your website.