Website Hosting 101 - Learning The Basics

As a beginner trying to find the right web host for your website is often daunting. The jargon used by most web hosts often goes way over your head. In the Hosting 101 section, BrandBlast has 6 lessons for the beginner who wishes to learn the basics of finding a web host. Lesson One: What is Web Hosting? Web hosting is the essentially the placement of your website onto the Internet through a server. Once your site is on a server, anyone with Internet access can look at your website - from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. In order to have your site hosted on the web, you need to have the following three things: A Website - a page or set of pages that is located under the same domain name. brandblast.com is a website (but you knew that already!) A web page is a computer document written in a publishing language called HTML. When an Internet user types in your web address, your web server sends the content of your web page to that user. A Domain Name - a unique text-based address used to locate a specific set of web pages. A domain name is made up of words and/or numbers plus a TLD (top level domain). The TLD for most businesses is ".com", such as http://www.brandblast.com/; non-profit organizations use ".org"; universities and educational sites use ".edu"; and sites involved with the U.S. government use ".gov". More TLDs are available, such as .biz, .pro, .name, .info, etc. An Account With A Web Hosting Company, or a server of your own to host your website.