Internet Hosting for Beginners

Internet hosting is, at its simplest level, a service provided to the public that allows you to have an internet webpage. The internet or information super highway is a name or nickname for millions of computers that are connected and from which you can access data. The computer that is part of the make up the internet is called a server. Servers can be as simple as the computer you have on your desk top, or the complex racks of computers that fill rooms. Most people do not host their own webpages on their desktop computer; they purchase the service from an Internet Service provider (ISP).

An ISP is a company that has a connection to the Internet, and they provide and sell that connection to the public. Most often you will here from the ISP that they have T1 access or multiple T1 access. This is a digital stream through which data is transferred. Internet hosting sells you time on this digital stream, which they call bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from your webpage to others. Some ISP provides shared web hosting that is less expensive and allows several users to share the digital stream and space on the server (though each is sectioned off from the others for security).

As the second part of the internet hosting you purchase server storage space. Each server has, just like your home computer, a maximum about of hard drive space. You commonly see in computer ads, that a computer has 200 GB of hard drive space. This means that the hard drive can store 200 gigabytes (200 billion bytes). To be able to conceptualize this a single character on your word processing program, usually, equals 1 byte. The servers that make up the internet are storing data on hard drives that have storage space measure in terabytes or one trillion bytes. You purchase part of the storage space in which to place your webpage. For most webpages shared web hosting is what they choose, as the price of dedicated web hosting is outside their budgets.

The third part of the internet hosting is usually e-mail boxes. This is a designated number of e-mail boxes set aside for your use. You can think of e-mail boxes as either a mail slot or a mailbox. It is the place where you receive, and sometimes, store the messages you receive. Each mailbox is designated by a name such as joeschmoo@schmoolimited.com. This means that Joe Schmoo is the name of the e-mail box and the @schmoolimited.com tells the internet where that mailbox is located.

Now you have the basics of what the phrase internet hosting includes.