Website Hosting
 

Web hosting is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for a website. It is where all the files that make up your website and e-mail can be found. Hosting removes the need of you having to provide and maintain expensive and complicated Servers.

Typically, an individual business hosting its own site would require a high speed connection, the Server hardware and the expertise to set-up and configure a web Server. Using a hosting service allows companies and individuals to get on to the Internet without the expense or effort of maintaining their own Servers.
 
A number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as BT, Demon, Pipex offer subscribers freespace for a small website that is hosted by one of their computers. While these services are free, they are also very basic.
 
Having your website hosted offers many benefits over freespace offered by ISPs:

Support for more advanced features such as CGI, PERL, ASP, PHP etc.
You can use your domain name as your web address instead of the long and often hard to remember ISP/freespace one
You can use your domain to send and receive e-mail
You are not sharing the Servers resources with 1000's of other users