[MUSIC] Hi and welcome to the lesson. Today, I'd like to discuss Web Hosting. Web Hosting is a service that allows people to post websites. Of course, people and businesses too. Hosting services provide special equipment. Support for that equipment, including 24 hours support and technology most people don't have available. This includes servers, which are really expensive high availability computers. Networking equipment and dedicated network access. There are different types of host. So, we then provide free hosting. Free hosting can be convenient, particularly when we're starting out, but the problem with free hosting is usually the service provided are of limited quality. So when we're choosing a host, if we choose a free host, we have to understand that we're probably going to get what we paid for. Shared hosting, by far, the most common. Share hosting is low cost. Meaning, it's not particularly expensive. In the US, it would probably be a few dollars a month, but the cost is kept down, because the hosting service shares resources between different websites. And then finally, dedicated hosting and this is higher cost, but it allows us to have a dedicated, personalize service within a hosting center. This is usually not necessary and is reserved for large businesses who need this kind of service. So for us, we are usually working with free or more often shared low cost hosting services. So, let's talk a little bit about what kind of services are provided. So, a hosting service provides us Disk Space for Files. Now as we learn later on the course, our websites are composed of many files. This include HTML files and images, both of which we'll discuss later in the course. Email Accounts. So for most hosting services, they will provide us Email Accounts. For instance, if we have a service or rather a business with a particular name say, Joe's Boat Service, we can get Email Accounts that will include the name Joe's Boat Service or any name that we chose for our website. We get File Transfer Software, which is usually called FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol and this allows us to transfer files from our computers where we're working on a website up to the hosting service, where the files can be displayed as part of our website. Hosting services give us Management Software, which allows us to manipulate files on our site and do other work on our site, such as starting the site and stopping the site and making any modifications we want to do and that we do this through the Management Software, the hosting service provides us. Hosting services give us Reliable Internet. Now many of us have Internet at home or perhaps we access internet on our phones, on our smartphones or possibly at a library or university. Well, hosting services have their own internet, usually they have several sources of internet and they provide this to us when we're using them as a hosting service to keep our website up and available to anybody who might want to see it. And finally, a hosting service gives us all of these things with economy. Now, a few dollars a month for a shared site is relatively inexpensive in most cases. If we were to buy this equipment or to have a dedicated site to house this equipment, it would typically cost thousands of dollars to accomplish. So the few dollars a month or sometimes even cheaper, if we pay for a year in advance is definitely a bargain. So, I will talk to you next time.