Hosting is the storing, serving, and maintaining of files for one or more Web Sites. More important is the fast, redundant connection to the Internet provided by the hosting company. The benefit to using a hosting company is simply cost, as multiple companies share space on servers along with the cost of a fast Internet connection, instead of a single company paying for and maintaining hardware, multiple connections to the Internet for built in reliability and redundancy, building a secure data center, hiring someone to monitor the data center 24 x 7 and so on.