You can think of hosting as the storage space which houses your website or emails (or both). Whether you’re looking at web hosting or email hosting, both of these types of hosting are referring to an allocation of storage space. This storage space can technically be thought of as existing “in the cloud”, but as with everything in the cloud, the data is in fact located on a physical server somewhere in the world. Usually, this physical server will be backed up or replicated across multiple servers, so that, should the primary server experience any performance issues, or perhaps even an outage, the other servers can pick up the slack to keep your services online and running smoothly.
Both web hosting and email hosting are typically sold as packaged products that include a range of features and resources to aid the performance of the systems that you use within them. This includes an allocation of CPU and memory, which are both necessary server-side resources for running email systems, applications or websites. Web hosting and email hosting will also come with a user interface that you can log into, to manage what’s being stored in your hosting account. Common hosting platforms would include WHM/cPanel and Plesk.
