In order to have a website, you need to keep the contents "pages and images" of your website somewhere. This is called "Hosting" your website. There are different hosting options, from very expensive , economic to free web hosting.

Files that represent the pages, images and contents of your website needs space, this space should be allocated on a storage media "hard drive". In order for the storage media contents to be available to web surfers, it should be attached to a computer that is connected to the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This computer is called a server.

The Server is a powerful computer with high performance hardware and large capacity hard drives, connected to the internet through very high bandwidth cables.

The server should contain a software that manages website files and present them properly for browsing, this software is called a web server.

Every server has a unique number on the internet called IP Address "Internet Protocol" Address, which uniquely identifies it to be accessible by any web user.

You can think of servers as apartment buildings with unique addresses. Each apartment unit within each building is equivocal to space rented out for individual websites. And like real apartment buildings, each unit also has an address based on "the building" in which it is located.

We hope this topic was friendly and clarified things.

We will discuss more terms and hosting types on the next topic.