Web Development
What is web hosting?
Quick answer
Web hosting is the service that stores your website's files on a server connected to the internet, so anyone can load your site. Your domain name points to that host. You pay a monthly or yearly fee, and the type of hosting you choose affects your site's speed, reliability, and how much traffic it can handle.
There are several hosting types, trading cost against performance and control. Shared hosting puts many sites on one server and is cheapest — often around ₹150–800 a month in India — and fine for small brochure sites. VPS and dedicated hosting give you reserved resources for more traffic. Cloud hosting (AWS, Google Cloud) scales up and down with demand and is billed on usage. Managed platforms like Vercel or Netlify handle the server side for you and suit modern frameworks such as Next.js.
When choosing a host, look at uptime guarantees, loading speed, the quality of support, and whether it can scale as you grow. Hosting is separate from your domain name: the domain is your address, hosting is the space your site occupies. Many hosts bundle in an SSL certificate and email, which simplifies setup for a new site.
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