What is a website, really?
A website is a set of files on a computer that never turns off. Here's how your screen gets them, and what the address at the top means.
By the AstroBeginner team. Reviewed by Nusrat Haneef, VP of Customer Success
Let’s start at the very beginning. No big words yet.
A website is a set of files
A website is a group of files. That’s all it is. Some files hold words. Some hold pictures. Some say what colour things are.
You already know files. A letter you typed is a file. A photo on your phone is a file. A website is files like those, made for the web.
The files live on a computer that never turns off
Your computer turns off. A website can’t, because people visit at 3 a.m. So the files sit on a special computer that stays on all the time.
That computer is called a host. You don’t own it. You rent a little space on it, the way you rent a mailbox at the post office. Many hosts give you a small space for free.
Your browser fetches the files
The program you use to look at websites is a browser. Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox are all browsers.
When you type an address and press Enter, your browser sends a message: “Please send me the files for this site.” The host sends them. Your browser reads them and draws the page on your screen.
That’s every website you’ve ever visited. Files, a host, a browser.
The address is called a domain
The address at the top, like astrobeginner.com, is a domain name. You rent it for about the price of a pizza each year. It points to your host, so people can find your files.
Until you rent one, your host gives you a free address that works just as well. It’s just longer.
Why this matters to you
Here’s the good news. To make a website, you make some files. Then you copy them to a host. That’s the whole job.
Astro is a tool that makes the files for you, from pages you write. We’ll get to that in part 5.