Hosting is the action that describes how storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of one or more websites and related services via a server.
Hosting is like an apartment building.
Imagine that you have an apartment within a building. There are tons of apartments within that one building.
The building is hosting your apartment, just as it is hosting all of your neighbors' apartments.
Hosting is the action that gives a website a place to live on the internet.
It's one thing to know what a term means, but that is worthless if you don't know why you should know what hosting is in the first place. Let's break down the importance of this tech term based on two high level categories. We'll walk through an explanation as well as provide a score, 1-10, that shows you how much you should care about hosting.
The first will be if you do not have a product yet. This means that you don't have a physical product. Maybe you're in the ideation phase, or maybe you're almost ready to start development. Whichever it is, we'll get into why hosting is important and why you should or shouldn't care about it if you do not have a product.
While you don't have anything to host just yet, you should start to plan ahead and figure out where you will be hosting your website/app/product. So, don't get stressed about it, but start figuring out which provider you want to use.
The second category is if you do have a live product. Maybe you just launched your business or maybe it's been live for years and you're continuing to improve its quality. Regardless of the scenario, if your product is live, software development carries a different weight.
Once you are hosted somewhere, there isn't much more to do. Make sure that you are paying your bills and that you are using the right provider, but as long as that is all set, it should be able to run behind the scenes seamlessly.
So you know what hosting is, by definition. You know if you should care about it or not depending on your situation as a business/company/product. To dig in deeper, we will walk through some examples so we can make sure you really have a solid grasp on hosting.
There are plenty of hosting options out there, so we will walk through some of the common tools used to host your website.