Web hosting allows individuals and organisation to display their website on the internet. Web host's are businesses that provide space on a server owned or leased by customers, they can also be used to provide internet connection, usually in data centres. Web host can also provide data space and connectivity for the internet to other servers located in their data centre.

The scope of web hosts varies substantially. The most basic is webpages and small file hosting where files can be uploaded via FTP or a web interface. Many ISP's offer this service free of charge to subscribers. Organisations can acquire web page hosting from an alternative source/provider. Personal web hosting is typically free as its usually accompanied by advertisements by the provider. Businesses will normally have to pay higher prices.

Personal hosting is substantial for single page websites where as a complex or large business website will require a better package that provides a database like mysql and provides application platforms such as PHP, Java, ASPnet etc. These facillities allow webmaster to build Content management systems (CMS),forums and so on.

Web host will usually provide a cpanel for managing their web space and installer scripts as well as other things like email.

Thers are many types of web hosting packages.

• Free web hosting- offered by companies with limited services and often accompanied by advertisements.
• Shared hosting-your website is placed on the server as many other websites
• Reseller Web hosting- allows clients to become web host themselves.
• Virtual dedicated server- splits server resources into virtual servers were resources can be allocated that does not affect the hardware
• Dedicated hosting- a webmaster gets full control over their server which their website is hosted upon
• Managed hosting- a webmaster gets their own server but is not allowed full access
• Colocation web hosting- similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service.
• Cloud hosting- is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing.
• Clustered hosting- having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization
• Grid hosting- this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
• Home server-usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection.

There are many factors to take into consideration when choosing a hosting package:

1. How much disk space you require- the amount of content you'll be uploading each month
2. How much Bandwith you require- the amount of traffic volume you'll be receiving
3. Do you require business email account
4. Do you require CMS
5. Do you need hosting that designed for ecommerce

There are many many other factors to take into account when purchasing web hosting. So be sure to do abit of research first and know exactly what you want. If you've hired a web designer to build your website ask them to recommend what hosting your site going to require plus alot web design and seo companies these days offer free web hosting and domains in their prices.