The web world may lead you into terms like domain names, web hosting and secure certificates. Confused yet? If you are new to this you probably are. What are the main ingredients a web site absolutely needs to be up and running. Two items exist that are essential for any web site to be up and running - a domain name and web hosting. Your name would be something like msn.com and your files would be hosted online for people to see.

The domain name is easier to understand, as every day you are typing in domain names. What about the web hosting side of things? When you purchase web hosting, what are you actually purchasing? Let’s explain. Web Hosting is like a container for your web files. Files for your web site could be code or multimedia files, such as HTML, CSS or Flash. Your web site requires a web hosting server, which is basically a computer designed to display your web pages. Basically a web hosting package is a service provided by a Company that allows anybody with access to the internet the ability to view your web site files.

Now that we understand what web hosting actually is, what do all these features mean when I am looking to buy website hosting packages? For starting sites, you will be mainly looking at two main features - disk space and bandwidth. Disk space is the size of files you can store on the web hosting server. The latter indicates how much data your server is allowed to transfer when web site visitors visit your web page. As you want to grow with your site and use more advanced features like for a Blogging system, you will want to look into language support (ASP or PHP) and database support (mySQL). Language support means the Server language the code was written in, while the storage container for your web data is placed in a database.

In conclusion, web hosting is a web server that allows visitors of your site to view your web site files. Depending on the nature of your site, you will then need to consider package features such as disk space, bandwidth, language support and database support.