Lately I have been learning about exactly how hosting works. I realise that technically oriented people blessed with great knowledge might quietly laugh at this. I thought, however, that it would still be worth bringing this back to layman’s terms to see if I can shed some light on the subject for the rest of us. The other option is for me to send you the ridiculously professional drawing I made of stick people and square boxes (just let me know if you want it :)).

It Starts With a Name

So let’s start from the beginning. Your website needs a name. Like, for example, www.quirkrocks.com. This website name (otherwise known as a domain name) needs to be registered somewhere in cyber space. There are quite a few companies that do this, like GoDaddy.com, namecheap and a pile of others. The only really important thing to make sure of is that the company you choose is ICANN registered. If it isn't, someone is probably just trying to steal your money. These registrar companies pretty much act like a telephone book, pointing people in the direction which a website can actually be found.

Find a Host

The files and pictures on your website need to be stored somewhere. You don’t really want to store these on your home computer where there are power interruptions and all sorts of potential problems. Hosting it at a secure location without interruptible power just makes sense.

This “hosting” is normally not done at the place where the name is registered, although more and more companies are also offering this. It is done with a separate company that basically just gives you storage space. You would contact a hosting company such as Rackspace and then buy an account to store your website on their servers.

Get 'Em Chatting

The next thing to do is connect the registrar and the hosting company to make sure that they are “chatting”. To do this, one needs to change some settings in the registrar account, essentially so that this telephone book knows where to find the telephone. These records are called DNS Records. They “point” from the registrar to the place where the website is stored. Tech guys at this stage like to say things like: “the site will take 24 hours to propagate.” But basically all this means is that the telephone book takes a while to let all the servers in the world know that the telephone has moved. In theory you shouldn't lose any visitors over this period, but you must bear in mind that this is possible.

So now users come along and want to find your website. To explain this simply, when someone does an Internet search and clicks on the address in the SERPs, their browser immediately takes them to the registrar. The registrar then re-directs the user to the place where these files are stored and hey presto! Your website is found. This of course happens in a millisecond, sometimes two.

There is obviously a more convoluted explanation and a lot more to say on the subject; however I have hopefully explained just enough of the process to unravel a bit of the mystery that is hosting. I am quite sure our hosting guru Grant W is silently chuckling about this simplistic explanation, but sometimes it’s better to just blow a KISS and “keep it simple, stupid!”

Oh and on a final note, if you like this post, I’m planning to do a few more on explaining the various concepts of FTP and all those other strange words that our tech teams use. So comment away and let me know if it helped.