Internet Marketing Advantage Search

What is Web Hosting?

To get your web page onto the internet, you'll to need to find some reliable web hosting. And exactly what is web hosting? Well I'm getting to that:

A web host is a company that has computers that are hooked up to the internet 24/7. These computers are called servers and they are assigned IP addresses in order that they may be found by other computers hooked up to the internet. It is on these servers that all your web files are stored, be they HTML files (web pages), graphic files, CSS files, Javascripts or whatever.

Basically what happens is when you type a web address into the address bar of your browser and then hit Go, your browser sends out a request to 'get' that web page. The request travels across the internet to the appropriate web server and attempts to locate the web page on that server. If the request is successful (web page exists) then that web page will load (or download) into your web browser.

These web hosting servers that store and serve up web pages to the internet cost money to set up, configure and maintain and thus web hosting providers that own these servers typically charge you a monthly or yearly fee to, at the very least:

Allow you to save your web files to their web server (called uploading)
Perpetually be ready to serve them up to the internet (make available for downloading)
Web hosting has become a very competitive business and, in order to entice more customers to sign up with them, web hosts now offer all kinds of bells and whistles to the deals or web hosting packages they make available.

And How Much Will It Cost?

With regards to cost, if you're just doing a little experimenting with hosting a website, you may want to consider trying some free web hosting (less reliable but you pay squat).

On the other hand, if you want to do it all up proper the first time around (and not be bothered with having to relocate your site after your free web host tanks) you'll be much more interested in paying a small monthly fee ($10.00 or less) to have your site hosted professionally. Affordable website hosting is readily available across the net. It's just a matter of finding the best deal with regards to all the options and features that typically accompany a web hosting package.