What is Website Hosting?

In our travels over the internet we run across the question “what is website hosting?” quite often. This is an attempt to clear up that confusion and to also define the working components of a hosted website.  Let me start by separating two terms used in conjunction with hosting, those being Domain and Website. First we have the Domain or Domain name. Domains are your .com .net .org etc address that you give to people when you want them to visit your site. Our Domain is www.highspeedweb.net for example.  When you sign up for a domain, whether you see it initially or not, that domain is pointed to the DNS servers of the hosting provider you’ve chosen.  DNS acts like a GPS, in that, when you put www.highspeedweb.net in your browser, DNS hears the request and directs your browser to the location of the hosting provider. This is now where the Website hosting comes into play. Your hosting provider stores a copy of your website on a server, so that when someone types www.highspeedweb.net into their browser the website itself is displayed. The Website is the actual text document containing the code that makes up your website. So to be very specific, website hosting, is the service your purchase to store and display your website. While the Domain name is the address you give to others whom you wish to have visit your site.