Many businesses are moving online, and it has come to stay. Whether you’re a fruit seller in Jos, a fashion retailer in Lagos, or a tech start-up in Abuja, having a website is an effective way to reach a larger audience for your business.
Have you ever wondered what keeps these businesses online and their websites consistently active? If yes, let me tell you for free, it’s web hosting. Let’s learn how web hosting works to support these businesses.
What is Web hosting?
Web hosting is that service that makes your website accessible to the internet. It is what keeps your website online for people to interact with it. With this, you will understand what web hosting is and why you need web hosting.
How Web hosting works
You may have heard the term “web hosting” numerous times and wondered how it actually works. If it sounds a bit ambiguous, don’t worry, we’re here to break it down into simple, easy-to-understand details to help you grasp how web hosting functions.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how web hosting works.
1. Uploading Website Files to the Server
Firstly, in web hosting, storing your files is the beginning of web hosting.
- Your website files consist of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, videos, and databases.
- These files are uploaded to a web hosting provider’s server. This is a powerful computer, specifically made to store and manage data 24/7.
- These servers are optimized for performance to make sure your website files are accessed quickly.
2. Connecting Your Domain to the Server
- Your website address (yourdomain.com) is like the human-readable version of your IP address, which is a numerical identifier like: 192.82.0.1.
- This DNS helps translate your domain name into its corresponding IP address For example, when you type www.yourdomain.com, the DNS resolves it to 192.82.0.1 and directs your browser to the correct server.
3. Processing User Requests
When you enter a domain name into your browser,
- The browser sends an HTTP/HTTPS request to the web hosting server.
- The server processes this request to fetch the relevant file (HTML, CSS, and other files) and return them to your browser.
- All this activity happens in milliseconds.
4. Serving Content Through Web Server Software
This web server software helps handle requests for servers.
- LiteSpeed: This provides speed and security, and it is often used by hosting providers to offer high-performance hosting.
- Apache: This is used for its flexibility because it is open source. This is when you can build and adjust particular software or applications.
5. Transferring Data via Bandwidth
When you access a website, files are downloaded from the server to the browser.
- Bandwidth: this is the amount of data that can be transferred between a server and the browser within a specific time. This simply means when someone visits your website immediately, they consume a particular amount of bandwidth.
- Hosting providers allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to you according to your hosting plan to ensure smooth performance even during traffic spikes.
6. Boosting Performance with Optimization Tools
Hosting providers use the following to optimize your website:
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): This helps to store the cache of your site on different servers to promote fast loading times for visitors from different locations.
- Caching is the act of temporarily storing files that are frequently accessed to reduce load time. For example, when you visit your school website frequently, at some point it will load so quickly as if you didn’t leave the site at all.
- SSD storage: Hosting providers that their servers use SSD are faster than the traditional HDD for enhancing performance.
7. Implementing Security Measures
Hosting providers make sure to provide adequate security for websites under them.
- Firewalls: this helps block unauthorised access to server
- SSL certificates: this encrypts the date transferred between your browser and the server.
- Malware scanning: this regularly checks for malicious threats and scripts.
- Backups: this automatically backups your website files in case of accidental deletions or attacks from viruses or any other cyberattack.
8. Managing Website Resources Through Control Panels
Hosting providers provide these control panels to make it easy for website owners who are not tech-savvy to be able to control their website and easily carry out some activities without much tech knowledge.
- There are many control panels, but these are the easiest to navigate. Such as cPanel and Plesk.
- This helps you to be able to manage server settings, databases, email accounts, and domains all in one place.
- This gives you access to commonly used content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
9. Scaling Resources as Traffic Grows
Different hosting plans need different resources. What shared hosting requires is different from what a VPS hosting plan needs.
- Shared hosting: in shared hosting, multiple websites share the same server, CPU, and storage.
- VPS hosting: this gives virtualized servers each dedicated resource.
- Dedicated hosting: here a whole server is assigned to a single user.
- Cloud hosting: here a single user is entitled to many servers to ensure fast loading and performance.
10. Monitoring Server Uptime and Stability
- Hosting providers regularly check on your servers to minimize downtime.
- They make sure uptime is guaranteed.
- They have monitoring tools to alert them to any problem before it affects your website.
11. Enhancing Functionality with Email and Database Hosting
Most hosting provider offer other services like
- Email hosting: this helps you create your own custom emails for your business (yourname@domainname). This helps to build your business’s credibility.
- Database hosting: this is a type of hosting that uses a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL to store dynamic data for your website. (for example, product information for e-commerce.)
Conclusion
Web hosting commonly starts with storing your website files on a server, connecting your domain to the server, and delivering content to users efficiently. To ensure your website is fast, secure, and always accessible, there is a collection of technologies like DNS, web server software, bandwidth allocation, and advanced security measures that come together to make up web hosting.
