What is website hosting?
If you have been on the internet for any time at all, it may seem obvious to you what website hosting is. But for newbies whom are interested, I will proceed to explain in the best way I know how.
Their are two main parts to a web site. (well actually more but we will get into that later) There is the domain name which is the actual web address. It is the name or words others must type into their browser to go to your site. These are easily registered at places like godaddy.com The most popular domain extension to register is still the .com’s which stand for commercial, then .net for network and .org for organization. Since so many names have been scooped up or registered since the inception of the internet, many new extensions have been added to fill the need. Some are .info, .tv, .biz and .mobile. If you did not know it already, there are online internet marketers whom have make a living at just finding the most sought after domain names and reselling them.
A few years back, the original owner of pizza.com sold it for over a million dollars. He sold just the name, or the rights (like land rights) for the new owner to develop a very advance website to generate lots of referral revenue. the new owner did not have to be in the pizza business to profit immensely from this adventure, but have the technical staff to develop the site.
So a domain name is like having a special piece of internet property, which can then be developed by adding the actual files which house what you want to say and your images. This is called a website too. So though they are different, domain names and the site files, are often inter changeably called websites.
It is easy to see the files on your computer by navigating to different folders on your hard drive. In the old DOS days we had to type in each one of those folders with command in front of it, but that is really digressing for now.
But in essence your site files need to reside on a computer hard drive which is part of the internet network. This is where web hosting companies will set up many advance computers known as a data center. The data centers have advance features to keep these computers running all the time. Advance features like temperature dust free controlled rooms and back up generators. Most website hosting companies do this so they can insure that your website is live and available 24 hours of everyday.
What are name servers?
It is easy to take for granted how we simply put in an address into our browsers bar or click on a link from our search results from google and a web page appears. We can navigate to anywhere in the world, as long as one thing is kept in place: name servers
In the beginning of the world wide web, a system was created whereas computers located in different places around the world could connect to each other. It was used mostly by higher universities and the military. It was created in mind that if one part or network of computers went down, access to other parts of web were still accessible.