In order for your web pages to be seen by the world, you need to have them stored on a computer that has two things: accessibility from the internet and the ability to "serve" web pages. A hosting company is a company that will provide a computer for you to put your web files on that is accessible from the internet. Most hosting companies have a series of computers that store web files for all of their customers. Since a web server is capable of "serving" files very quickly, hosting companies can put more than one website on a computer.

Your account at a hosting company buys you a certain amount of disk space, usually some e-mail addresses, and a destination for your web address (e.g., www.goliveessentials.com). All of your files are stored in a folder on that computer that only you have access to, and this serves as your "root" folder. This is where your home page goes. You can make as many more folders and files as you wish.

Your hosting company will give you FTP (file transfer protocol) access to your website. Simply enter this information into the GoLive ”Publish Server“ information and GoLive will do the rest.

There are many web-hosting companies, so you should know a little about what you want to do with your site before choosing a company. Some offer services like e-commerce (credit card purchasing), some offer advanced audio and video services (streaming servers), some just offer lots of disk space (photo libraries or online archives), and many offer server-side scripting capabilities. See our Static vs. Dynamic Pages page.