How does web hosting work?

It's pretty important to have your web hosting set up the right way.  A lot of people don't really know how web hosting works, they only know (hope) that it does.

It's actually pretty simple, but by de-mystifying it, can save you money, especially if a company provides both your design and hosting and you can't work out what they're charging you.

This is how the internet works at a basic level:




Cool, huh?

Your web hosting requirements will depend on your website, but if you only have a simple website, you won't need anything too expensive.

The two mechanical parts you will have to pay for are:

the Domain name:
This is your website's unique name on the internet, eg. www.yourdomain.co.uk or www.yourdomain.com  
That's it.  You have to pay annually to keep this registered to you.

the Hosting:
This is a computer constantly connected to the internet (a server) on which your website's pages are stored.

Whichever company provides your internet connection keeps records of which set of files go with which domain name, so that your computer knows which pages to load when you load www.yourdomain.co.uk.  This is known as DNS (Domain Name Registration) which just means keeping a record of which website name goes with which web pages and where they are stored.