Hosts, what do they actually provide?

irishdude11

Everyone gets the general idea of what it means to have your website 'hosted' on some server. Or have VM hosted by your OS.

But what exactly does a host do and how does it do it? Ive using WCF and you can 'host' the service in a IIS, a windows service, visual studio hosting, even a console program etc...it seems like it can be hosted by almost anything. So are hosts simply executables that provide threads for other processes to run on? If you can host a WCF service in a three line console appliction it certainly seems like it...

stevenmu

There isn't really a single technical concept of a "host". A web host, a VM host, a WCF host are all entirely different concepts really and I'm not sure if there's any useful way of describing them as a single class of object.

amen

In general when people talking about hosting a web service they mean that you approached a vendor and they have agree to provide a server (windows/unix) (or part there of) that you have access to and that you can use to put some applications on that use the services on the server i.e. a web site, a database etc.

In the case of your WCF and hosting in IIS, IIS provides the framework and heavy work in processing requests from a client and passsing to your WCF object and taking responses from your WCF object and passing it back to the client.

You could consider these hosts as infrastructure in the way that roads/buildings/offices(IIS) are infrastructure that allows customers to get to a shop where you sell goods (WFC)

komodosp

you can 'host' the service in a IIS

You can... But it probably won't be accessible from the Internet, unless you have a static IP address, in which case by all means you could host your own website in IIS... I think