According to Wikipedia.org: "An Internet hosting service is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content to the Internet. There are various levels of service and various kinds of services offered."

For our purposes, a hosting service refers to companies that offer space to store your webpages in such a way that the internet users can see your pages. They also will have their systems backed up and usually have disaster recoverability plans in place that minimizes the amount of time that your pages might not be able to be seen due to acts of God or other disasters.

Some hosting services also provide email accounts, ftp, the ability to run various database or applications platforms (ASP, PHP, Java, Ruby, etc), ecommerce, and more.

The scenerio that we recommend is to develop and edit your pages on your local computer.

When you are pleased with your page(s), copy them to your local back-up system.

Then FTP them to the hosting servers. FTP means File Transfer Protocol. This is the process of copying files from your computer to the hosting machine for viewing by the public or members.

Visit Houston-Websites.com to see some hosting service offerings.