How Web Hosting Works

Definition: The business of providing the storage, connectivity, and services necessary to serve files for a website.

How it Web hosting works:

1. You register a domain name. For example: yahoo.com. This is done through a domain registrar. The domain is a legal entity you lease.

2. You set the domain’s DNS information. DNS is an acronym for domain name server. The DNS record is in this format:
ns1.prattinternet.com - 207.44.188.108
ns2.prattinternet.com - 207.44.189.249
Where ns1 is the primary name server 1 and ns2 is the secondary name server. Notice that there is IP information for each name server. Generally all you have to enter is the name server information which automatically correlates to the IP information.

Purpose: The purpose of doing this is to associate the domain name with the hosting server. Each hosting server has it’s own DNS information.

3. Someone accesses your site.
A. They open a Web browser and type in the domain name.

B. The browser requests the web page from your computer’s preferred DNS server by asking if it knows the IP address associated with the domain name. This is the hosting server where the site files reside.

C. The preferred DNS server will either have the IP address or look it up. It does this by querying a “whois” database for the primary DNS associated with the domain name of the site. This gives the browser information about the IP address where the site is hosted.

D. Once it has the IP address of the hosting server, the browser makes a request directly to the hosting server for the page and the page is sent to the browser where it is viewed by your visitor.

Web Hosting and Domain Registration Service  

Pratt Systems Web hosting includes a free domain name, plenty of Web space, e-mail, Webmail, outstanding customer service, and a range of Internet marketing resources. Click here for more information.