Web hosting or a web site hosting company as it is sometimes referred to, is a company that hosts websites for a variety of other companies but it does so on the web host’s own computers. Most of the time an Internet service provider (ISP) offers plenty of web hosting services.

The scope of what web hosting can do is tremendous. At its most basic and simplistic level, web hosting involves a web page and small scale file hosting and in this way, computer files can be uploaded by way of either a Web interface or else a File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

These files are delivered to the Internet with little if any extra processing required. Many Internet service providers offer web hosting to their subscribers for free or else a small fee. In other cases, web hosting can come about by way of an alternate service provider. Generally speaking, web hosting is free or relatively inexpensive and is sponsored by advertisements.

Web hosting is mainly used for personal homepages, as more complex corporate sites require higher level of database support and platforms for application development.

Web hosting also includes a web interface panel such as Plesk, Hosting Controller and cPanel and these make it possible to have e-mail service to install scripts as well as to adequately manage the web server. In some cases, web hosts specialize in a certain type of software or service (as for example, e- commerce) and are used by large corporate establishments to outsource work to a particular web site hosting company.

Web hosting involves hosting up time and that refers to the percentage of time that the host is accessible to users over the Internet. Most web hosting companies aim for hosting up time that is 99.9%, which means that over a calendar year, the downtime is approximately 8 hours and 46 minutes. It is important to keep in mind that planned interruptions for any number of reasons as well as server restarts are sometimes a reality of web hosting.

Web servers can sometimes also run Internet hosting services and there are a number of web hosting services that are limited strictly to the Internet. These services include the free web hosting service, the shared web hosting service, reseller web hosting, and the collocation web hosting service and finally, clustered hosting.

A web site hosting company will have many options with both good and bad points. Examples of a specialized web site hosting company services are image hosting; video hosting, blog hosting, and one click hosting, file hosting and shopping cart software.