How does it work?
The following is a little simplistic but in essence shows how hosting works. Your website will be held on a machine with a fast connection to the internet. That machine is identified through it’s ip address. When you type in to your browser www.yourdomain.com the protocol used will look up the domain name to find the ip address of the machine where it is held. That machine will then present a page to your browser for display.

What does it give me?
At the least your web hosting will provide your site pages to anyone that requests them, however most hosting provides a whole lot more. It will maintain a log of all the requests and show these as a statistical analysis of where the requests came from, what was requested as well as information about the browser and computer. The stats will even tell you which search engines were used and what was searched for.

As well as hosting the site it will also provide email facilities, with possible a webmail service so you can access your email anywhere, a number of addresses in the format of name@yourdomain.com, you should also expect antivirus and spam filters for your email.

Depending on the level of your hosting you may also have access to one or more databases that can be useful if you have a “dynamic” website or a content management system.

There is a whole lot more that hosting is capable of, but this post hopefully has given you an overview.