I have spent a lot of time on this channel talking about various web hosting providers but I never
actually took the time to explain what is web hosting and how does it all work. So,
in this video I'll answer exactly that and if you think you know everything there is to
know about web hosting keep watching you might just learn something new!
To understand how web hosting works you first need to understand how websites work.
Every single website is composed of different files that are responsible for showing text,
images, buttons, login, contact forms and similar elements to the users. So,
a website in essence is just a collection of various files and these files need a place where
they can be stored in order to view them. And that place just happens to be a computer! Just
like you would store pictures on your computer and simply open them up whenever you want to view them
the same exact way you can store website files on your computer to view your website. And at this
point you might be thinking so wait I can just turn my own home computer into a web server?
Yes! Yes, you absolutely can I even have a guide on how you can do that right here. But it's not
the best idea. This comes with a lot of problems, for one in order for your website to be online
your computer would need to be connected to the internet at all times. If you lose connection
that's it your website is offline. And most home usage internet connections simply do not
pack enough juice required to efficiently transfer files to thousands of visitors,
you would need an extremely high bandwidth internet connection. And of course your computer
can overheat or break or the electricity could go out all resulting in your website being...
Yep! Offline. As you can imagine if absolutely everyone hosted their website this way we would
have complete chaos. Imagine if Google, YouTube or Facebook would be offline for days or weeks
just because someone's cat spilled coke on the computer. Luckily people had a better solution!
Web hosting companies emerged, these companies would build specialized, cost effective computers
that aren't very good for regular usage but are extremely efficient at storing and transferring
data. These computers are called servers, the next step was renting out huge warehouses to store all
of those servers making sure they're kept cool have access to the internet and maintenance.
These server warehouses are called data centers and these bad boys are huge! The largest data
center is 10 million square feet or 920 thousand square meters. This is the equivalent of 170
football fields combined! And that's just one data center, there's probably thousands of them all
around the world. These web hosting companies rent you the server space for a monthly fee,
this way you have a reliable and maintained environment to keep all of your website files
safe and secure. But this also comes with some unique advantages. For example, they give you
a control panel and an interface to manage your website easier. You also get the tools necessary
to create professional looking email addresses and configure their servers for additional security,
so your websites and email addresses are safe. Well all of this seems nice and great, but it does
come with some concerns for the future. One of the biggest ones being just how much raw electricity
these mega data centers consume. Just to give you a small example YouTube gets around 1.5
billion views every single day. To provide a smooth playback for this amount of use the data
centers storing the information consume as much electricity as 60 000 US homes do in 1 year. And
that's just 1 website in 1 day! A big portion of the electricity consumed is then converted
into heat because the components in the server constantly increase in temperature while under
load which then requires even more electricity being used to dissipate the heat and cool the
servers down. And recently the web hosting industry has been under some heavy fire for how
much electricity it consumes. Some experts even go as far as saying that as the demand increases
this will actually become a major problem. But obviously where there's a problem there is a
solution and some web hosting companies have already started combating this using something
they call "Green Hosting". It's basically them using solar or wind energy to power all of their
servers and then planting a lot of trees at scale to offset their carbon footprint. But to summarize
this is how it all happens: your website is just a bunch of files stored on a massive remote server
that you're renting a minuscule part of while it continues to work non-stop 24/7. These servers are
connected to the internet and are able to transfer the files to your viewers at a rapid speed. But
another question often associated with web hosting well if it's all just servers in a warehouse is
every single web hosting provider equal? No, not at all! Different providers have different size
data centers and their servers are made up from different components for example some providers
use the latest 2019-2020 technology while others don't want to upgrade and still use the
same servers they built back in 2005 and have been constantly working for 15 years. So, when choosing
your hosting provider do some research! And now you have the knowledge about what is web hosting
and how all of it works, but knowing is just half the battle the other half is the hard part of
actually going out and hosting your website. For your convenience I'll leave my top recommended
companies in the description down below and if you buy it through the links you'll also get a
discount. So, congratulations on getting that knowledge and I'll see you in the next video!
you