Web Hosting

Web hosting is the service of keeping a website on servers connected to the internet so anyone can reach it. Few people run their own server at home, since that requires a reliable connection, a fixed address and constant upkeep. Most sites instead rent space from a host, and the kinds of rental have changed with the technology.

In the mid-1990s free hosts gave anyone a personal page in exchange for showing ads. Pages lived at long addresses inside the host's own domain, often sorted into themed neighborhoods. Paid shared hosting became the standard for small sites. Hundreds of customers share one machine, each with a folder, a database and a control panel, uploading files over File Transfer Protocol. It's cheap and simple, but every site competes for the same processor and memory, so one busy or compromised neighbor slows or endangers the rest; see Multi-Tenancy. The machines usually came with a ready-made scripting stack, so a blog engine could be installed with one click; see LAMP stack and WordPress.

A virtual private server gave each customer a slice of a physical machine that behaves like a dedicated computer, with its own operating system and full control, at the cost of maintaining it; see Hypervisor. Rented cloud infrastructure took that further. Since the mid-2000s, servers can be created and destroyed in minutes and billed by the hour, and platforms that hide the server entirely let developers deploy code by pushing it; see Containerization.

Many sites need no server-side code at all. Pages generated in advance can be served as plain files, and static hosting puts those files on a worldwide network of caches, often for free at small scale; see Static Site Generation and Content Delivery Network. That arrangement is fast, cheap and hard to break, which is why it suits blogs and documentation.

Hosting is separate from owning a name. Domains are bought from a domain registrar and pointed at whichever host serves the site, so a site can change hosts without changing its address. Keeping the two with separate companies makes it easier to leave a bad host.

Hosts compete on a few measures. Plans have long been priced by storage and data transfer, with charges or throttling when a site exceeds its allowance; see Bandwidth. Uptime promises spell out how much downtime is acceptable and what the customer gets when it's exceeded. Hosting markets are famous for "unlimited" plans with fine-print limits, and for the pain of migrating when a cheap host is sold or shuts down. Keeping copies off the host matters for the same reason.