Once you have built your site, you need to find a place to host it. Websites are not located in virtual places. They run on computers. When you visit a website on the Internet, your browser communicates directly with that website, which is on a computer running Web server software and a variety of other application server software products such as database, security, content, and mail servers.

In choosing a place to host your website, you will consider two basic options: host it yourself or choose a company that specializes in website hosting to do it. It does not matter where you physically host it, because software is available to set up, configure, and maintain your website remotely. So even though your site may make its home off the premises, you can make changes from anywhere! There are benefits to both hosting your website locally on your premises as well as having a company host it for you. If you decide to host your site locally, you will need to purchase the hardware and connections required to run a server, plus the server itself, and you should probably hire a full-time employee to upgrade, maintain, and work on the equipment and the website.

One of the big benefits of having a company host your site is that should a problem arise and a crash occur, the hosting company has a battery of staff members to fix the problem and get your site up and running fast. Sometimes they’ll even have it backed up before you know there was a problem! Your website is your online presence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers expect to be able to find it any time of day or night. If you choose to host your own site and it goes down at 4:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning, who will be there to fix it? It is definitely something to be considered.

In most cases you will want to pay a Web hosting company for this service. First of all, by the time you invest enough money to host your website reliably and efficiently, you would need to start your own Web hosting service to recoup the costs. Second, the expertise needed to maintain a high-quality Web server and high-speed connectivity to the Internet is not trivial; it is very difficult and involved. In short, in 999 cases out of 1,000 there is no question about the best route to take: hire a Web site hosting company.

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