What is hosting?

In basic terms, web hosting is where your website actually lives. Or to get slightly more fancy about it: a website is a collection of files that exist on a server connected to the internet and accessible to be viewed via a web browser. When someone visits the given domain, these website files are displayed within the web browser as the actual website. When you combine the website files with the hosting server and a properly-pointed domain, you have all the ingredients necessary for a website to be visible online. And that, in a nutshell, is web hosting.