Web Hosting ABC: What is a Web Host

The term hosting is generically used to describe a variety of services necessary to support a web site.

When we request for a page of an website the request is served by a software called "Web Server" running in a remote location. It may also require a database like MS SQL server to retrieve the various information related to the website. A web hosting provider or web host is a company that hosts all these resources (both software and hardware) required for the website.

The computer running the web server can be owned by the site-owner or by the hosting company (provider), but it must reside physically in the premises of the hosting company and must use provider's internet connection.

The scope of hosting services varies widely. As I told before, it must provide a web server at minimum and preferably database support. Now-a-days most of the hosting packages comes with a lot more e.g. application development platform (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python etc.), support for Content Management System (CMS) e.g. Joomla, a control panel to manage the web server. More about these features will be discussed in the future posts.

Based on the service levels the web hosts can be categorized in following groups --