Internet web site hosting is the process by which the pages of a web site stored on a web server are served to the requesting browser. The hosting service provides the owner of the web site, some space to keep his or her web pages physically stored on their web server, and allowing them to be made available to the browsers which request each web page. Earlier when the internet had just taken off it allowed only one domain name per IP. But with the explosion of the internet and the development of multitasking web servers, it became technically possible to have multiple domain names pointing to the same IP address. An analogy can be drawn to a hotel with many rooms. The hotel is equivalent to the Host computer having a single IP. And the individual internet web sites hosted on the web server to the room in the hotel. Internet web site hosting is similar to taking a room on hire. You pay for the web hosting as you pay for staying in a hotel room.
The concept of internet web hosting is very simple. The web servers need to remain connected permanently to the internet over high speed links which are usually not affordable for general web masters to maintain these web server computers just for themselves. So these web masters use the service of web hosting companies who own and maintain web servers in their data farms, and provide shared or dedicated internet web site hosting services to all those who require it, for a fee.
Shared internet web site hosting is a low cost alternative to the one IP one Web site hosting method. It is a popular service where several hundred domains may point to a single physical IP address, where a single web server handles all these websites by itself., where each web page being requested by the user is sent back accordingly by the web server. Contrary to this, some websites which have very heavy traffic or run special applications which require more heavy duty resources that a web server being shared by hundreds, cannot provide, in these cases, one would get a dedicated web server, just for their internet web site.
Shared Internet web site hosting allows the hosting company, who owns the web server doing the hosting, to host multiple websites on a single machine. The limit to the number of websites a computer can host is only limited by its computing capacity and its storage capacity. New software technologies have come up which run virtual computers inside a large super powered computer. These virtual computers running on the same hardware behave as independent machines and each of these can host hundreds of internet web sites. But these types of computers are pretty expensive so now internet web site hosting companies have started using a fail-proof cluster of computers for the hosting purposes. These systems use a redundant array of inexpensive computers which share the huge load of internet web site hosting by the techniques of load balancing. If one computer stops working, the rest continue to work.
The computers used for Internet web site hosting need a dedicated high speed always-on connection to the Internet. Data centers which huge amounts of dedicated bandwidth usually host these machines. However with the advent of ADSL technology, which provides a reasonably good speed at the user, and allows to them to always be connected to the internet, it is possible to have Internet web site hosting right at your own computer at home, under your own control.