What is web hosting?

Every website is composed of a number of files including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP not to mention the text content and images. All of these files need to be ‘hosted’ somewhere to be delivered to your web browser when you type in a domain name. Web hosting is provided by a computer in a data centre that houses all of the files of your website on a hard drive. Whenever you type in the domain name or web address to a website, that computer ‘serves’ the files to your web browsers.

Hosting is best provided by companies who specialise in this and is normally charged on a monthly or annual basis. Web hosting can cost between £5 per month all the way up to £10,000 per month depending on the size of your website, what it needs to do and how many visitors it gets per day.