What is web hosting and why do I need it?
Once you have a Web Site designed, you need a place for those web pages to reside. Web Site pages exist on a computer, called a Web Server, which is hooked up to the Internet. A Web Server is a specialized computer which is turned on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks a year. Without a Web Server, your web pages would not appear on the Internet at all. You could run your own Web Server right from your home and save the hosting fees assuming you learned how to set one up and maintain it. However, every time your local Internet connection went down, every time your local power went off (including blown fuses) and every time your Web Server crashed, your Web Site would be unavailable until you fixed the problem. Web Hosting companies provide backup power sources, redundant connections to the Internet using several vendors and have spare computer parts and spare whole computers waiting to swap in at a moments notice. Another concern for a Web Server is security. There is literally
