Web hosting is a service provided to enable individuals or businesses to create their own website and make it accessible to others via the Internet. Host companies provide space and connectivity for their clients on servers (data centres) they either own or lease. From there, they are then made available for other web users to see/ visit.
The range of cheap hosting services varies greatly, starting from basic small scale file or web-page hosting (files are uploaded via a web interface or File Transfer Protocols – FTPs – and are transferred to the web either as they are or with very little processing), a service offered free by many Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Alternatively, web hosting can be obtained from other providers. Personal websites, particularly single page sites, are usually hosted free or relatively cheap, as most of them are sponsored through advertising. As a rule, free hosting has only restricted space and bandwidth limits for users.
Complex business web sites require more comprehensive packages, more disk space and higher bandwidth, and thus generally incur much higher fees. For business sites, shared, dedicated or managed/ unmanaged hosting offer much better facilities, support and security than free hosting is able to provide.