When you visit a website, a lot happens in the few milliseconds between pressing Enter and seeing the page. Your browser talks to a DNS resolver, which translates the domain name into an IP address. The browser opens a connection to that address, negotiates a secure TLS session, and asks the server for the page. The server — the web host — reads files from disk, runs any code required to assemble the response, and sends it back. This article walks through each step and explains what a web host actually provides, where performance comes from, and why things like SSL, backups, and isolation matter more than raw spec sheets.