The hosting provide physical space for your website. This is a special computer and it is always online and connected to internet. This system should provide fast and maximum reliable access to the website from every point in the world. Besides in this computer should installed set of software to "serve" websites. It's called web server or internet server.
There are companies doing installing and supporting web servers. They offer services for rent a part of the physical memory and resources of these computers and you can install your websites there. This is web hosting or shared hosting, because you shared resources of server with other users.
Set of elements, included to hosting and their features represent the concept hosting plan:
This is a size in MB (Megabytes) of space in the server for your website. The disk space includes space for database and saved of email boxes toward your domain.
It dependends from the size and the attendance of your website. If your website is bigger, you have need from more traffic.
This is a number of email addresses toward your domain name, which you allow to create. Usually the hosting is shared - there are many users in the server and everybody from them is rent small part from server resources during the period of time.
For use the service hosting is necessary the owner of the website possess domain name and direct his domain to web server. Hosting account manages from control panel - cPanel.
Other both types of hosting are VPS (Virtial Private Server) and hired web server. VPS is a normal web server, but on it are installed a few independent operation systems. The physical server is divides into few independents virtual servers. Every system uses part of CPU resources, part of RAM, part of the disk space and so on. In this way users have full access for virtual server administration.
The hired web server is controling entirely from client and hosting company supports hardware and network security. These both kinds of hosting are more expensive and they are using from big websites or such, which using a lot of resources.
The hosts are identifed with own IP addresses like 123.456.789.910. IP address is a point from the whole internet address space and it makes a server part of internet.