What is Hosting

The website you visit are first developed on a computer by a software engineer. If the web site, also called web application, is large, it is developed by a team of software engineers and then each team member contribution is packaged into one software and run on local computer/s inside the company. On local computer/s, it is well tested by the software engineers or quality assurance engineers. At this stage the website can not be accessed on internet because that local computer is not uniquely identified on the internet but only at the local network inside the company.

So to make a website accessible by all users on internet, it must be put in some computer which is always ON and connected to the internet. Hosting means placing web application on a server that is always connected to internet so that it can respond users’ requests. It includes putting everything that is required to run the website e.g. static contents (images, styles, scripts), dynamic contents (PHP files, for example) and database or any other resources that your application needs.

After it is hosted on internet, it is accessible by an IP address and the web-application name. For example http://172.49.84.78/web-application-name. If that computer has only one website, we can access it using the IP address only e.g. http://172.49.84.78/

As you know remembering the IP address is difficult for the users. Here comes the role of domain name. What a domain name is, how it works, from where to buy? In addition to buying domain name, we also need to perform some settings that connects the domain name with the hosting computer, I would explain these all tasks or process in some other post.