Website hosting is an aggregate of services that makes it conceivable for a web site to be online and be accessible from any country around the world. When you write out a domain name in a browser's address bar, what you see are the files that are stored on the hosting servers of a web hosting company. The web hosting service also offers the option to set up mailbox accounts using your domain, to set up and administer databases, to create password-protected areas, and to keep track of all site viewers - what web pages they visited, what web search engine or web site they arrived from and in which state they were located. Other options that come with each website hosting package are FTP access, the possibility to set up custom domain records, domain parking and forwarding options, etc.