If you’re thinking about starting a website, then you may have come across the term “web hosting” without entirely understanding what that means. When you see that web hosting usually comes at a cost, you may start to wonder, “Do I need web hosting?”

The short answer is: yes. If you want to have a website, you need web hosting.

But you may feel better about the expense involved if you understand what website hosting is all about.ing!

What is Web Hosting?

We talk about the web like it’s something that exists outside of physical space. Terms like “cyberspace” and “the cloud” reinforce the idea that the many sites we access on our devices don’t live anywhere physical – they’re floating out there somewhere, as if on the air.

In fact, every website that exists on the internet takes up physical space on a web server somewhere. But those web servers are out of sight for most of us—kept in storage facilities around the world that few web users have cause to visit.

Even though we don’t see or think about those servers much, they’re a necessary part of our internet experience. And the service they provide for websites—storing them and making the the site’s content accessible to people around the world online—is what we call web hosting.

In a nutshell, that’s how web hosting works.