The Web Server and Web Hosting: How the Websites Became Accessible to Worldwide
What is Web Server?
A server is nothing but a computer, that serves the data as per client’s request. The web server is a server that serves the web pages along with their contents.
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is a service that makes any website accessible on the internet. As a web hosting you just buy a storage where you store your website You can understand it properly with an example:
Example: Imagine you rent a land and build your home on the land. Here your HOME is the WEBSITE and the LAND is the WEB HOSTING. And your home must have an address that is the DOMAIN name of your website.
How many types of web hosting are there?
There are four types of web hosting. Those are :
Shared
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Cloud
Dedicated
What is Shared Hosting?
In the shared hosting multiple people share the same server resources including memory, processing power and storage space.
What is Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting?
In the VPS hosting you also share the server with other users but this time the web host creates a virtual partition for each user. This means a site that is hosted on a virtual private server, gets an allocated amount of resources.
What is Cloud Hosting?
In the cloud hosting it uses multiple virtual servers to host websites. For this, if one server is having high traffic or a problem then the other servers will take over and it will maintain the website operation smoothly.
What is Dedicated Hosting?
In the dedicated hosting you get an entire physical server that you can configure according to your need. Here you can configure the server, choose your operating system and software as well as you can customize the entire hosting environment according to your specifications.
Why We Need Web Hosting?
As we learned that web server is nothing but a computer then a common question can come in our mind and that is why we need web hosting to host our website, we can use our computer as a web server?
Thus we can use our computers as a web server but there will be several limitations like our computer is not that much powerful to work as a dedicated web server. A web server needs to be always active to serve the website in every client’s requests. But it is not practically possible to open and connected with the internet all the times to make our websites accessible through the internet.
For those reasons we use the web hosting that is always connected with the internet and serve our websites on our behalf so that our websites is always accessible through the internet.
From this article hope you have a clear understanding of web server and web hosting.