Hosting is the provision of a hard drive space on a server in a data centre for the distribution of a website to the world wide web via individuals, small business's and P.L.C's.

There are a number of ways the hosting companies provide there services.

• Virtual Server - This is space shared on a data centre's server, one physical server is divided up, thousands of times so that it operates like a single server. The User only has control of the virtual server and not the physical server. This allows no control of the operating system.
• Shared Server - The allocation of the hardware is divided up a fixed number of times, so that the physical hardware is shared between the user's of the server. The user has limited control of the operating software, including which operating system is run on the server and the physical hardware controls.
• Dedicated Server - The user has total control of the server and the physical hardware controls including remote rebooting of the server by the data centre staff, the user can choose which operating system is installed on the server, including any other third party software.

Getting the designed website uploaded to the host server is all done via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software, which is installed on the user's and hosted data centre server.