Web & SEO
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is the service that stores your website's files on a server connected to the internet and serves them to visitors who request your address.
New to Bolt? Sign up free.
Technical definition
Web hosting provides the server infrastructure, storage, bandwidth, and runtime environment required to make a website reachable over the internet. Traditional categories include shared hosting, where many sites share one server; virtual private servers, where a server is partitioned; dedicated hosting, where a machine serves one customer; and cloud hosting, where capacity scales across pooled resources.
Managed platform hosting collapses these choices. Provisioning, scaling, TLS certificates, content delivery, and deployment become part of the platform rather than decisions the customer makes.
In plain terms
Hosting is where your website lives. Your domain is the address; hosting is the building.
Without hosting, your site exists only on your computer, and nobody else can see it.
Why it matters
Hosting used to be a decision with real consequences: pick wrong and your site is slow, goes down under traffic, or costs more than it should. The traditional stack also came with work you did not want, including certificate renewals, server updates, and backups.
For most small businesses that decision has disappeared, and the reason to understand hosting now is different: knowing what is included tells you what you are on the hook for.
The questions worth asking of any host or platform: does HTTPS come set up, what happens when traffic spikes, are backups automatic, and can you export your site and leave. That last one is the only question that is hard to reverse.
