What Is Website Hosting & Why A Website Hosting Service Is Needed

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I realize that this is a beginner topic if you already have a website. But many people who are just working on creating their first site ask what is website hosting, and why website hosting is needed. In this article, I will explain what website hosting is, how it works, and why it is important to use a website hosting service provider rather than host your own servers.

What Is Website Hosting

Website hosting (sometimes called web hosting) is a combination of a computer and software on that computer that work to serve up the contents of your website when someone requests your url on the web.

When you buy a domain name, you usually have to configure it to set the address of where the content of the website is going to be coming from. That configuration is your web host. So when someone enters your url in a browser, it invokes a lookup of a configuration, and a request is sent to your website hosting servers. And the website hosting servers are configured to know that they need to serve up the contents of whatever page was requested. Then the contents of that page are sent to your browser, and the page is displayed.

Why Every Site Needs Website Hosting

Without hosting, you would not be able to serve up the contents of your website from your own url.

There is one case when website hosting is not necessary. You might recall that some urls on the web sometimes appear like this somename.wordpress.com with the word before the first dot being the identifier of the site, and the middle word being the actual site where the website is hosted. That means that the owner of this site did not buy their hosting and are using the free hosting provided by WordPress. The problem with that is that it looks incredibly amateur and unprofessional. So if you are intending to have a business or a serious blog, you should really get your own hosting.

How To Set Up Your Site Simply And Quickly

It is actually pretty simple to set up your site. It can take as little as one day to buy your domain name, set up hosting, and begin doing business. For example, the amount of time it took me to set up this blog was about 3 hours. That included buying a domain name, buying hosting, and configuring the domain name to the hosting. And then I was up and running with my new site! I even made a tutorial for how to replicate exactly the steps I took to set up this website. Here is the tutorial for how to set up your website.

Why You Should Not Try To Host Your Own Website

Some people make the mistake of trying to avoid using a hosting company and setting up their own hosting for their website. That is a terrible mistake. It sets you up to waste countless amounts of time configuring and troubleshooting your own hosting servers. And that takes your time away from building and growing your actual business. Plus, it is extremely unlikely that your own hosting will perform nearly as good as the hosting provided by existing hosting companies because that is their expertise.

Further Business Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app.  Additionally, here is the iOS fundraising app. And here is the Android fundraising app. And here is the Android business idea app with the iOS business idea app being here.

And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.

Author: Alex Genadinik

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