Web hosting is the service that stores a website and makes it available on the internet: a website is a set of files (and often a database) sitting on a web server — a computer built to hand those files to anyone who asks — and hosting is renting space and services on such a server. A domain name plus DNS tells browsers which server to ask, and HTTPS secures the conversation. Every public website is hosted somewhere; the practical questions for students and universities are what kind of hosting fits coursework, and who should provide it.
What does web hosting mean?
Web hosting means paying for (or being provided with) space on a web server where your website lives. When you build a site — even a single HTML page for a first-year exercise — it exists as files. On your laptop, only you can see them. Put those files on a hosting account and they are on a machine that is permanently online, reachable by anyone with the address, from anywhere.
That is the whole idea; everything else in this guide is the supporting machinery — how browsers find the server (domains and DNS), how the connection is secured (HTTPS), what else lives in a hosting account (databases, email), and the different shapes hosting comes in.
Where is a website stored, and what is a web server?
A website is stored on a web server: a computer running software (commonly Apache or NGINX) whose job is to receive requests — 'send me the page at this address' — and respond with the right files. Servers live in data centres: buildings full of machines with reliable power, cooling and fast connections, run by hosting providers. When a university provides student hosting, each student's site lives in their account on such a server, typically UK-based for UK institutions.
The useful mental model for a student: the website and the hosting are different things. The website is your work — files, images, code, database content. The hosting is where it lives. You can move a website between hosts the way you can move files between computers, which is also why 'my site' and 'my hosting account' end at different times (a distinction that matters when a course ends).
What are domain names, DNS and IP addresses?
Servers are found by IP address — a number like 203.0.113.7 — but people use names. A domain name (educationhost.co.uk) is the human-friendly address you type; DNS (the Domain Name System) is the internet's directory that translates the name into the IP address of the server hosting the site. Type the address, DNS looks it up, your browser fetches the page from that server — the whole round trip in milliseconds.
Students on university hosting usually do not buy domains: they get a subdomain — a name carved out of a domain the institution already owns, such as yourname.university-teaching-domain.co.uk — which costs nothing extra and clearly marks the site as coursework. The domains guide in this series goes deeper, including DNS record types and connecting a personally-owned domain.
What is SSL, and why does HTTPS matter?
HTTPS is the secure version of the web's transfer protocol: the padlock in the browser bar means traffic between visitor and server is encrypted, so it cannot be read or tampered with in transit. It works through an SSL/TLS certificate — a credential the server holds that proves the site's identity and enables the encryption.
Modern browsers treat plain HTTP as a defect, flagging such sites as 'not secure', so HTTPS is table stakes rather than a luxury — including for coursework. Good student hosting includes certificates on student sites as standard (Education Host's student hosting, for instance, includes SSL across institution-branded student subdomains), so students learn HTTPS-by-default as normality rather than as an upgrade.
What are files, databases and email accounts in a hosting account?
A hosting account bundles three kinds of storage. Files are the site itself — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, PHP code — organised in folders and managed through a file manager or upload tools. A database (most commonly MySQL on teaching hosting) holds structured data for dynamic sites: WordPress posts, user records, anything an application reads and writes; a first project that moves from flat HTML to a database-backed app is crossing the most important conceptual line in web development. Email accounts at the site's domain are the traditional third element, present on hosting platforms though less central to teaching.
The account also carries settings and limits: storage quota, database allowances, subdomain configuration. All of it is managed through a control panel — the next section — rather than by logging into the server itself.
What is a hosting control panel?
A control panel is the web interface for managing a hosting account without command-line access: upload and edit files, create databases, install applications, manage subdomains and view usage, all through the browser. cPanel is the most widely used panel across the commercial hosting industry and the one most university hosting teaches on — which is itself a teaching benefit, since the tool students learn is the tool they will meet at work. Plesk and DirectAdmin are the other established panels.
One click deeper than this guide needs to go: the cPanel guide covers what students can actually do in it, and the control-panels guide compares the options for institutions choosing one.
Read next: cPanel hosting for universities and students
Does every website need hosting, and can a student host a site for free?
Every public website is hosted somewhere — the only question is by whom, under what terms. And yes, free options genuinely exist: static-site services (GitHub Pages and similar) host HTML, CSS and JavaScript at no cost and are excellent for what they cover; free tiers of site builders and app platforms host within their limits; and a laptop on a desk can technically serve a site to nobody in particular. Free is not fake — but each option's limits matter for coursework.
Static services run no server-side code and no databases, so the PHP/MySQL/WordPress half of web teaching is out of scope. Free tiers come with ads, quotas, unpredictable terms and no institutional visibility — workable for personal experiments, poor for assessed work that must stay up through a marking window. Which is the case for institution-provided hosting: not that free alternatives are worthless (students should know them), but that coursework needs identical, governed, durable accounts — and the full server-side stack — for every student, not just the ones who found a good free tier.
What type of hosting is appropriate for coursework?
For the standard web-teaching portfolio — HTML/CSS/JavaScript, PHP and MySQL, WordPress, portfolios and group sites — institution-provided shared hosting with a control panel is the fit: industry-standard tools, per-student isolated accounts, institutional sign-in and lifecycle, SSL'd subdomains, and no student administering a server as a side quest. Where the module's subject is the server, the network or the operating system, coursework belongs in cloud lab environments instead.
A term glossary to close the foundations:
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Web server | A computer (and its software) that hands out web pages on request |
| Hosting account | Your allocated space and services on a server |
| Domain name | The human-readable address of a site |
| Subdomain | A name under an existing domain (you.example.ac.uk) |
| DNS | The directory translating names to server addresses |
| IP address | The numeric address DNS resolves to |
| SSL/TLS certificate | The credential enabling HTTPS — the padlock |
| Control panel (cPanel) | The web interface for managing an account |
| Shared hosting | Many isolated accounts on one managed server |
| VPS | A whole virtual server you administer yourself |
| Database (MySQL) | Structured storage for dynamic sites and apps |
| Quota | Your account's storage or resource limit |
How do universities provide hosting like this?
At single-student scale, hosting is a purchase; at cohort scale it is a service with identity, provisioning, support and lifecycle to run — the subject of the rest of this answer centre. The delivery-models guide compares the ways institutions provide it, and the complete guide walks the whole territory end to end. Education Host's own approach pairs managed cPanel hosting with Student Web Host Manager, an education-focused management layer that handles the cohort-scale machinery: bulk provisioning, Microsoft Entra sign-in, module structure and end-of-course lifecycle.
Read next: How universities can provide web hosting to studentsStudent web hosting: a complete guide