For a web site to be made available on the Internet, it has to be hosted on a web server. This is where web hosting comes in. It's just like renting property. There are plenty of companies that will rent you space on a web server. The wide range of services start from free hosting to buying a server for your sole use. You could spend thousands of dollars a year on web hosting alone.

Web hosting is the act of renting space and bandwidth through a company so that you may publish your web site online.You can either opt for free hosting that is usually supported with banners and pop ups, or may opt to get paid web hosting, which gives you complete control over your site contents.

Also known as shared hosting, this form of web hosting should suffice for most everyone. Virtual hosting simple refers to the fact that your site is on one server, and that this server hosts mulitple sites. You are virtually shared - your site will not be the only one on this specific server.Very few sites would actually need the power of a dedicated server, so this option provides to be a reliable and cheap solution.

Diskspace is the size your website can be. Every single letter on your website has to be stored somewhere on your web host's server. Each letter is one byte, and a megabyte is roughly one million bytes. HTML pages are usually very small, but it is the extra images, scripts, and even databases that can take up large amounts of disk space.

Bandwidth/Transfer is the amount of data the server will allow your site to send in a month. Transfer is usually measured in gigabytes - billions of bytes. Once you go over your monthly limit, a host may either shut your site down for the remainder of the month or it can charge you 'overage.' This overcharge is usually about $2.00-$5.00 per extra gigabyte of transfer.

Uptime is literally what it means - it is the amount of time your site is online throughout the entire month.

The best uptime would be 100%, but because things can break, many hosts offer 99.9% uptime guarantees. This means that if your site is not accessible for more than 43 minutes in a single month, they will reimburse you, depending on their terms of service.

Monthly data transfer is the amount of information that is transmitted to/from your Web space. Each time a picture or HTML page is viewed by a visitor, you upload data using FTP, or email is received it adds to your monthly data transfer. A transfer limit of 1 GB allows 100,000 hits.

A host name is an Internet address or domain name with a prefix. For example, the host name of the domain name "yourdomainname.com" is "example.yourdomainname.com."

To illustrate in everyday terms, a web host is like a man who has built and maintains a structure, then rents small units of that structure out to individuals and organisations that otherwise cannot afford the cost of constructing their own building. A domain name can be likened to the address to each unit e.g.. Suite 26, Sunrise Plaza

So, a web host runs an interconnected group of web servers containing web site data, that other computers can access through the Internet. A web site is a group of files (web pages, images) and/or programmes (PHP, CGI, ASP scripts) that reside on a web server (computer) connected to the Internet so that visitors can access those files/programmes, while a domain name is a unique identity/address that makes it easy for visitors to access the exact web site data they are looking for.

A Web host is a company or organization or nerdy teenager that runs a server connected to the Internet and offers space on that server to people who want to put a site online.

Web hosting ranges from free, for ad-based hosting like Geocities, to hundreds of dollars monthly for a dedicated server. Note that you do not need a dedicated server for the average pro wrestling fan site, although some hosting firms will tell you otherwise.