Web hosting providers rent out web space on a monthly or yearly basis just like office space. So, the definition of web hosting is directly in its name - it is the process of hosting web data. Essentially web hosting is the real estate industry of the web. When you have a web site or store data online, it is stored on a server. A server is nothing more than a computer: generally a high powered machine optimized for internet usage. Some companies or individuals setup their own hosting operations from scratch, however this can be a costly and time consuming process. This is why people turn to web hosting providers to store web sites and data. A web hosting provider is able to purely focus on proper technical maintenance of the server and its connection to the internet. Instead of worrying about up-keeping complicated server technology, clients can focus on their business and leave the technical work to web hosting professionals.
With thousands of web hosting providers and thousands of service offerings, prices vary from free to thousands of dollars a year. Some companies rely on an expensive rock-solid hosting solution for the success of their business. Perhaps they provide internet access, or run a high trafficked, high content online store. Others may simply be using the web to tell people about their company - a web brochure. Web hosting is not only used for storing web sites however; company databases, email, picture files, mp3's, movies, and anything that you could put on your computer can be stored on a server. Once a database or web site is setup, the client is able to easily access their server space using a web publishing tool or an FTP (file transfer protocol) tool. An FTP tool simply put, is an application that allows you to upload files to a server. Many of these tools are free.
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