Web hosting is a form of Internet hosting service which facilitates one, with an online system for storing data, image, video, etc by means of World Wide Web. The companies that provide space on a server for their clients are called Web hosts.

Web page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal homepages. A composite site calls for a more wide-ranging package that provides database support and application development platforms like PHP, Java, and ASP.NET.

Types of hosting

Free web hosting service: A free, advertisement-supported web hosting, and is extremely limited when compared to paid hosting.

Shared web hosting service: One's Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU.

Reseller web hosting: This allows clients to become web hosts themselves.

Virtual Dedicated Server: sharing up a server into virtual servers. Each user feels like they're on their own dedicated server, but they're actually sharing a server with many other users.

Dedicated hosting service: Here the user gets his own Web server and gains full control over it like, root access for Linux or administrator access for Windows. But the user normally does not own the server.

Colocation web hosting service: This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. This is similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server.

Clustered hosting: Sites like Wikipedia uses this form of hosting. Here several servers host the same content for better resource utilization. source: wikipedia