What is web hosting?
The service that stores your website's files and serves them to visitors. The land your site is built on.
Web hosting is the service that keeps your website’s files on a server connected to the internet, so that anyone typing your address can load it. If a domain name is your address, hosting is the land the building actually sits on.
What good hosting gives you
- Uptime. Your site stays online, reliably.
- Speed. Files served quickly, from servers near your visitors.
- Security. Protection, backups, and an SSL certificate for HTTPS.
- Room to grow. Capacity that holds up when traffic spikes.
Types of hosting
- Shared. Cheap; your site shares a server with many others.
- Managed / cloud. More reliable and scalable; the host handles the hard parts.
- Static / edge hosting. Modern platforms that serve pre-built sites from a global network, often very fast and very affordable.
The right choice depends on what the site needs to do. A fast, mostly-static marketing site has very different hosting needs to a busy web app.