In the last article on about how to start blogging, I ended the post with “Ok, now we’ve got our domain, how do we get it to point to our IP address? How do we get an IP address? That’s the answer to the next article in this series…”. Well the answer to this question is that you need to use a hosting service that will lease you space on a computer (with an IP address) to host your website.

What does this mean? Well before we can answer that, let’s backtrack a little again. Every website, since it’s beginning of internet time, has to be hosted somewhere. And that answer is that it’s hosted on a computer. Yes it can be hosted on a home computer, but I’d strongly suggest against that. In the early days many people did that, even I did that when broadband first came out. Today it’s not advisable, and some ISP (Internet Service Providers) will disconnect your internet access if you do this. As well, it does require a decent amount of technical skill because you need to be running a webserver, incorporate substantial security measuers, etc. So for now, let’s assume we need to lease space on a computer somewhere on the internet to host our webpage from a company that specializes in this.

Ok, so if we don’t do it ourselves, where do we find such a service? Through a “hosting company”. There are litteraly thousands of hosting companies on the internet. I don’t think there it’s even possible to list all the hosting services on any one webpage as there’s so many, and they change all the time (just like there’s new gas stations opened everyday). There’s also many different types of hosting services, which we’ll discuss shortly. If you do a search on Google for “Hosting”, you’ll find millions of entries.

Anyways, for now, what a hosting company does for you is provide you with space on a computer that runs a webserver to transmit your webpages. Without being too technical, a webserver is a software application that’s always running in the background waiting for people to request webpages, and when it gets the requests, it sends the appropriate webpage. So for example, if I type in http://www.FollowSteph.com, it knows to send back that particular webpage. Now it’s a little more complex than that, sometimes the webpages don’t really exist and their created one the fly, that is they are dynamically created by the webserver, but for now let’s assume that it just sends a webpage.

So what a hosting company does for you is provide you with space on a computer that has internet access to let everyone access your webpages. Not too complicated so far. So let’s add another piece to the puzzle. Every computer on the internet can have one or more IP addresses. The IP address that we talked about in the last post is the address of that hosting computer. The webserver, using it’s internal magic, will convert the IP address, plus the remaining part of the webpage address to send you the specific webpage you wanted that’s stored on it. So for example, if I go to http://www.LearningCentre.com, the computers relaying information on the internet, convert this address into IP 207.58.160.157 and the webpage index.html (if you don’t specify a webpage, it assumes the webpage you want is “index.html”). Just to confuse the issue a little, it’s also possible to have more than one domain on an IP address, but we’ll ignore this for the scope of these articles. At the end of the day, the webpage address is telling our hosted computer what page to send back, which in the last case is “index.html”. Had we put http://www.LearningCentre.com/somepage.html, it would return the contents of the file “somepage.html” that we had on our webserver. in our case, since LearningCentre.com is dynamically created, instead of sending “index.html” it creates a new webpage on the spot and pretent it’s “index.html”.

If this isn’t all clear, don’t worry about it, it will become clearer with time. Right now I’m just trying to explain what’s going on, more to help you later make the links between what’s happening behind the scenes. But if its not clear, don’t worry, a large percentage of successful bloggers and website owners don’t know these details.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering where you can find a hosting company, and if all hosting companies are the same. If you think about it for a second, you can image that Ebay, Google, Microsoft, etc., have very different hosting needs than a single person’s blog does… So the answer is that no, there are many different types of hosting companies and services. And this will be the topic of my next article in this series.