Web Development for FitPros: What the Heck is Web Hosting?

Setting up your fitness business can be a minefield of new terms, acronyms and even entire fields of niche knowledge that you, a former-fitness-enthusiast-turned-professional, never even knew existed. Web development can prove particularly tricky. Let's start with the basics, then: what the heck is web hosting?

Marketing your business & learning the lingo

If you’re like most people when setting up their first business, you are currently swamped in a deluge of words, phrases and acronyms that mean literally nothing to you but which everybody else seems to bandy about willy-nilly. 

Particularly on the technical side of business development, things can be pretty opaque. 

Thankfully, FitMedia is much more than just another marketing company. 

We’re also here to help you cut through the many layers of confusion that surround setting up your business, from concept development through to getting customers. Many hurdles have to be cleared, but we’ve helped our clients clear them time and time again.

One such hurdle is web hosting – and this is something we get asked about a lot. 

To explain it as simply as possible: 

Your website is your house.
Your domain name is your home address.
And web hosting is what you pay for the ground your house is built on and the water and energy that keep it running. 

If you’re happy with that level of explanation, then feel free to click away. But if you’d like to understand it a little more, keep reading… 


Web hosting: A closer look

Still here? Great. Let’s dive in.

Your website is a collection of files. Each file might represent a page, for instance. And each file is full of code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) that lets the computer know how to interpret the file and how to present it visually for the user viewing the website. 

You can actually have a look at these files by right-clicking anywhere on the screen and pressing ‘Inspect element’. 

But where are these files? 

They are stored in a physical internet server in a building that might look a little like this: 

You know that scene in every action movie ever where the hero has his computer hacker friend in his ear telling him how to hack into the terrorist's servers and destroy their files? Yeah, well, that.

When you pay for web hosting, you are essentially ‘renting’ the space on the physical server that stores the files for your website. These servers make your website available to the rest of the internet and anyone who searches for it. 

Pretty useful, right? 

Without web hosting, your website is nothing but a bunch of files on your own computer with no way of being reached by other users.

Most services – like WebFlow, SquareSpace, WordPress, etc., come with web hosting built-in. When you pay for your WebFlow monthly or annual package, you are paying for web hosting along with everything else. You’re often not told what all the different parts of your package are, though we think that it’s important to understand what you’re getting and what it all means


What we can do for you

At FitMedia, we’re very transparent with the cost of hosting and will invite you to setup and manage your billing via our own platform.

 

This way, there’s never any hidden fees or commitments. 

Through your relationship with FitMedia, you’ll also have your very own website editor, meaning you can manage and update your website without needing to go through us – and though we do charge a small commission on your hosting fee, we also include unlimited small changes at no additional cost to you. 

If you’re interested in getting your brand-new website built, managed and hosted for you by a team of fully-transparent industry professionals, consider booking a call with FitMedia today. 

Are you a FitPro in a bind? Need industry-leading marketing tips but nothing springs to mind? 

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