Hosting is a term used to denote a provider storing your website, content & data for you so that it can be made available publicly over the internet. In order for this to happen, a provider must set up a proper network to be able to serve your website or content. Since they are providing this service for you and don’t “own” your data, they are simply “hosting” the data for you. Most hosting providers co-locate your data on servers with other customer data and go through great lengths to make sure data is securely stored. The trade-off with hosting is that while it may be cost effective because you are sharing a network with other customers, the speed of your website or content delivery will be slower because it isn’t dedicated to just you.

What do we mean by this?

The internet’s publisher.