A website is a collection of web pages, documents and multi-media files that are hosted (stored) on a server (computer) on the Internet. The server can be in your own town, in another part of the country or in another part of the world.
All of the public Internet servers throughout the world are interconnected. When a person goes online with their personal computer, they connect to the Internet and are then able to access all publicly available documents and files stored on the World Wide Web.
The location of a website and its files on the Internet is usually identified by a domain name.
When you type the domain name for a website (website address) into a browser address field, or click on a link to the website via a ?search engine results page, you are requesting to view that page and the related files stored on the server at that location (the domain).
Your request is sent from your computer to the server of your Internet service provider, which then passes on your request. The request is passed through a series of interconnected servers until it gets to the ?host? server where the website files are stored.
The host server responds to your request by sending the content back to you along a similar path of Internet servers. You are then able to view the web page and related files via your web browser, e.g. FireFox or Internet Explorer.
Since these terms are somewhat abstract some people confuse their website ‘domain name’ with their website ‘hosting’. In my next post I will go into a bit more detail about what a domain name is, and how it relates to your website and hosting.
