All About Internet and Web Hosting

Your website has to be hosted on web server to make it visible to the world. World Wide Web (WWW) is a network of computers from all over the world. Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (aka. the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separate but related things. The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused. Through the internet, all the computers in the web can communicate with each other. The communication protocol used by all computers are called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP ), HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.

When your computer is connected to internet, your computer as a web client, need a program called web browser to view the web pages which are stored on web servers. Popular browsers are Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox and Google Chrome. A browser fetched a page from a web server by a request which is a standard HTTP request that contains a page address like this: http://www.example.com/index.htm.

The browser displays web pages by reading display instructions of the web pages. The most popular display instructions are called HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tags.

You need to subscribe to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to get internet connection. When your computer is connected to a network, it can act as a web server. Website is a collection of web pages, website must be published in order to be visible to other users in the Web. To publish your website, it must be copied to a web server. Web hosting means storing your web pages on a public server, which usually includes email services and domain name registration.