What is ‘Hosting’?
Continuing on from the previous blog entry on ‘Domains’. We’ll turn our attention to ‘Hosting’ which goes hand in hand, to recap, as a metaphor, a domain is like the address of a house, the ‘Hosting’ is like the land where the house/website resides.
Hosting is the place where the website is held, where the website is actually stored – or built (but in reality deployed as it could be build somewhere else and transferred to the hosting environment).
You want your website to be available on the internet 24/7 (well that’s the aim). If the website was just on your local machine, you’d be using your machine as a web server to host your website – however, that would rely on your machine being powered up and turned on all the time.
If you was using your own machine and was using it for gaming, or word processing or anything else, the performance of those tasks would be impacted when someone came to visit your website. You can also control the security appropriately on a dedicated server for hosting your website, as it will be available for people to access – and therefore attack. To setup your own machine as a webserver, you would have to open up certain channels/ports (paths) to your machine – like keeping your house door open and unlocked, there are certain security measures you’d want in place.
For these reasons, there are dedicated hosting servers available to store your website.