What Is Web Hosting?

One service often closely associated with domain names is web site hosting. The World Wide Web is a massive collection of web sites, all hosted on computers (called web servers or web hosts) all over the world.

Because of the web's uniquely global nature, a web site should be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rather than pay to have a 24/7 dedicated Internet connection to an in-house webserver, many people opt to host their sites with a web hosting provider. Web hosting clients simply upload their web sites to a shared (or dedicated) webserver, which the ISP maintains to ensure a constant, fast connection to the Internet.