What is the difference between hosting a website and publishing a website?

I have created a website for my catering business and want to be able to offer the site by search criteria

hosting is the term given to anyone who has the website on the harddrive of there computer and available to the internet community. most of the websites out there are on computers owned by business who pay a lot of money to keep the bandwidth high and to keep a backup available, they do this because they can then offer you the ability to have lots of people look at you site at the same time without it slowing down (high bandwidth) and the ability to keep your site online and available to view 99.9% of the time.

Publishing is how you get your site on there computers. they give you an FTP address and a passcode, you use this information to upload your website to there computers and within seconds your site is live on the net. if you have a web address.

To set up a website you need

A website pre built. use netobjects, Dreamwever ect
A webaddress ie www.youaddress.co.uk
an FTP address ie FTTP:youraddress@service.com
an FTP passcode ie 123456
a hoster, a business running a server ect

you can host your own site, but that depends on how long you keep your copmputers on and bandwidth.

Its easy to run your own site with a basic hoster.

hosting is just providing space for someone to publish a website to
publish is actually creating the website

see www.mnenomicmultimedia.com I can host the site, Meaning display your site for all to see. Publishing the site is getting the site from your computer to the host.

Publishing is making it available to others. Hostings is just storing the necessary files that are needed to view the content of your site.

Hosting refers to offer/serve the page on the Web, is one Web server that content a site ( or many ).

Publish a Website is make able that others see the Web.

The host is the person that owns the server the websites are posted on. The publisher is the person that created the website. To offer your site, go to the popular search engines and "Submit" your site...it will take about 4 months for the spiders to crawl your site. After that you will be seen by all.

I hope this helped