What is website hosting, and why do I need it?
When you look at a website, you're looking at files stored on the hard drive of a powerful computer known as a web server. Servers aren't very much like the computer you're sitting in front of now - they have to be turned on, running, without breaking down or crashing, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Pretty well all they do is acknowledge requests for web pages (which happens when you click a link or type an address into your address bar) and then send the pages. They do one thing, and do it well.
A server lives in a data centre, which is a secure building with ridiculously fast data connections and the adequate provisions to ensure that the server is never disconnected from the Internet, and never breaks down.
They usually have some sort of redundancy built in - for example, massive batteries to power them in case the data centre loses power, or backup servers that kick in when lots of people look at a particular website at once.
When you buy web hosting, you're buying space on a server for your website's files to live in, a very fast Internet connection to those pages, and a team of people to look after the server.
There are several elements to what we call "Hosting" - you get space for your files on the server's hard drive, a certain amount of data transfer to and from those files, access to programs installed on the server, and someone to look after the machine itself. It's the "someone" and the data transfer that cost the money - largely because someone has to be keeping an eye on the server 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.
Let's take an example - the Steel package gives you a hundred megabytes of storage space, and five hundred megabytes of data transfer per month. So, you can upload 100mb of website files to your storage space before you run out of room, and 500mb of data runs between the server and the outside world before you run out of data transfer. In simple terms, people visiting your website use up your data transfer, in proportion to how much space your site takes up and how many pages they look at when they visit it.
For example, let's say you're a band, with a Steel account. On your website, you've got a few simple web pages, a photo gallery and one of your songs for people to download. The web pages each take up only a few kilobytes of room. The photo gallery takes up a little bit more space - about 100kb per picture. For the sake of simplicity, let's say you've got ten pictures, making up roughly one megabyte, and that your song is about four megabytes. We'll discount the web pages themselves, as they're too small to really matter unless you're getting thousands of visitors a day. So, that makes your website about five megabytes in total.
If everyone who comes to your site decides to look around the whole website, you're looking at 5mb per visitor. You've got a data transfer limit of 500mb per month, so after a hundred visitors, the site shuts down until next month (or until you upgrade to a higher package).
Of course, that's a highly simplified version of what'll really happen - for one thing, hardly anybody will look at everything on your website. In fact, usually less than one in ten people will, so let's call it a thousand visitors a month - but that, too, is a very rough estimate.
For more details on how to choose a hosting package, see this guide - and for a comparison of all our different hosting packages, see this comparison chart.
