What is web hosting?

Question

I am trying to make a website, but I still have a lot to learn. I don't really understand what web hosting is

Answer 1

As you may know a domain name is just a name, not a real website. If you are going to create your website: 1- Buy a domain name. 2- Buy a web hosting service to provide your online space and enable you to get your website online at your purchased domain name.

Any bad web hosting service would trouble you for a long period. At first, try to choose a reliable service to get rid of the subsequent problems. It is very important that your service be uptime. It means that you can access your account whenever you want to update your web pages, and your visitors can view your website whenever they type your website address. If your hosting service is not uptime it is real h**l!

If you want to start your website I recommend purchase your domain and hosting together. In this way it is possible to get your domain for free. Some hosting services offer this gift today.

One of these services is reachable at: http://bluehost-service.atspace.com . Their service is really great and easy to use. This company offers "Free Site Builder" that helps you build your web pages without difficulty if you are not skilled in using any website creating program. (WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get).  

Answer 2

web hosting is not complicated as you may think.

I can use an analogy to briefly tell you what web hosting is all about.

Web hosting is like renting a room or a house where you are going to live and store your stuff. A web hosting plan will enable you to store the content of your site which can then be viewed by your site visitors.

You can learn all about the basic factors about web hosting here http://www.your-inforcom.com/BasicInform...  

Answer 3

web hosting represents the service of putting someone's website files (like html files, image files, etc) on a computer (aka server) that essentially is built for the purpose of allowing people to retrieve those files and view them in their browser like internet exporer. You have to have the files on a server that people can connect to in order for them to have access to the files int he first place, hence the need for web hosting. The reason you can't use your own computer (in case you were wondering) is that it won't be on 24/7, probably won't have good enough processors, won't have any of the necessary web page serving software installed, probably won't have good enough RAM, and more likely than not won't have a good enough connection. Web hosts have extremely good connections, the kinds that cost as much as 10's of thousands and maybe even 100's of thousands of dollars a month to have.

If you're looking for a quality web host, check out http://www.hostamina.com

Answer 4

Web hosting provides services like web space, email, FTP, etc.

Try a free web hosting:

http://www.000-webhost.com/

Get a free domain name:

http://www.co-cc.com/

Answer 5

Web hosting is usually a company who offers to host other people websites, host meaning that they you upload your site to their servers, which will then make the site available on the Internet at a certain address (URL).

An example of some free hosting services are listed below:

http://members.freewebs.com/ - freewebs

http://geocities.yahoo.com/ - geocities

http://www.weebly.com/ - weebly

http://www.tripod.lycos.com/ - Tripod

Many of these host also offer free templates, as well as their own page creator tool, these templates might help when aiming for valid markup/code.

You can also get your own unique URL (domain name), this can be done in several ways, but i recommend that you simply sign up with http://www.one.com/ or similer, such are called shared hosting solutions, meaning that the server hosting your site, is shared with other domains. Shared hosting will be sufficient in most cases. You can find many such hosts at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ as well as comment on them, and/or read about peoples own experience with them.

The process of making the site can be simplified by WYSIWYG editors such as dreamweaver. But it would be recommended to learn hand-coding as well, since such editors, or incorrect usage of same, is known to produce invalid code, and bad cross-browser combatility.

You can learn how to hand-code your pages at websites such as http://www.w3schools.com/ and http://www.brugbart.com/

Its recommended to atleast learn HTML combined with CSS, and then forget about all the deprecated attributes and elements used for presentation.

Its also important to validate your code, for this you can use the w3c markup validator at: http://validator.w3.org/ - The W3C Markup Validation Service

Along with the CSS validator at: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ - CSS Validator