Simply put, without a web hosting provider you have no way to serve your new website out to the internet. Web hosting is sort of like a virtual hard drive that you can store your website files and images on.

So why can’t I just put my website files and images on my personal computer’s hard drive?

Well technically you could, but for the most part your personal computer is not equipped to be serving out files constantly to the internet. Not only that, but unless you have a T3 line or greater, your website is going to take forever for a user to download when they visit your site.

Now take into consideration the technical aspect of serving your website off your home computer. It would take an unexperienced user weeks on end just to get the most simple services running on a home computer. Im not talking spending an hour a day for a couple weeks but hours and hours a day reading through a lot of technical manuals and a lot of unsuccessful installations and setups. It is a lot harder to setup your own hosting server than you would think.

Well…I would at least save money hosting it myself, right?

Think again. The cost (electrical) of leaving your computer on 24/7 will far outweigh the cost of going with an established web hosting provider. Not only that, but once you consider the dozens and dozens of man hours you put towards getting your home server setup the expense of doing it yourself has risen even more.

The reason you need a web hosting provider is because without one your new, great, awesome website will not be visible on the web. While you could host it from your own computer, it is far more practical and less expensive to go with a cheap professional web hosting service.

Web servers are able to map the path component of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into:

1. a local file system resource (for static requests);
2. an internal or external program name (for dynamic requests).

For a static request the URL path specified by the client is relative to the Web server's root directory.

Consider the following URL as it would be requested by a client:

http://www.example.com/path/file.html

The client's web browser will translate it into a connection to www.example.com with the following HTTP 1.1 request:

GET /path/file.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

The web server on www.example.com will append the given path to the path of its root directory. On Unix machines, this is commonly /var/www. The result is the local file system resource:

/var/www/path/file.html

The web server will then read the file, if it exists, and send a response to the client's web browser. The response will describe the content of the file and contain the file itself.