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Definition: website


A website is a presence on the World Wide Web. As of 2021, there are more than one billion. To qualify as a bona fide site, it must be available over the Internet around the clock. Rendered with various spellings ("Web site," "web site" and "Website"), a website is a collection of Web pages (files) coded in HTML that are linked to each other and to pages on other sites. A website is run (hosted) on a Web server by the site's owner, a Web hosting provider or an Internet service provider (ISP). See Web hosting and Web server.

Websites by Other Names
A "portal" is a website that covers a topic or an industry, or it may contain data about an individual such as a medical portal. "Search engines" are sites that index all the content on the Web. "Social networks," "blogs" and "wikis" are sites that contain user-generated content. An "extranet" is a password-protected website for subscribers or business partners. See portal, search engine, social media, blog, wiki, extranet and intranet.

All the websites mentioned above are accessible to the general public via the Internet. However, an "intranet" (intra-net) is a private, internal website for employees only that resides on the local network safely behind the company's firewall (see intranet). See Web vs. Internet, Internet domain name, ISP, HTML and HTTP.