Let’s say that you have a website you want to put live on the Internet. Because outside users can’t access files on your computer, saving your website’s files on your computer won’t do you any good. In order for your page to be available to the public, you must host your site on a server. These servers hook your page up to the Internet, allowing world wide access.
These servers are normally provided by hosting companies and are ideally located in a secure data center. These companies lease out individual servers or segments of servers. A user generally pays a monthly hosting fee to reserve the right to upload information via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to one of these servers.