title: How exactly am I accessing the host/server through localhost on phpMyAdmin?
body: <hr>
  
  <p>I am working on a school project in which I have to upload data onto a database hosted on phpMyAdmin.</p>
  
  <p>What's confusing me right now is that I see "localhost" at the top of the page and before I even query the database I see "Run SQL query/queries on server "localhost":"</p>
  
  <p>Does this mean that I'm hosting a server on my computer and accessing the database through that? Because then I query for "SHOW VARIABLES WHERE Variable_name = 'hostname';" and it returns with hostname = webhost330. (It is hosted on webhost330.asu.edu).</p>
  
  <p>I'm extremely confused about what this means. Thanks for any possible help.</p>
  
  <p>I'm very new to databases so forgive me if I'm missing something simple here.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: To clarify: I'm not at school, I'm at my house. What kind of implications does this have? In other words, what's the difference between this and hosting a database locally? </p>
  
  <p>When I host a database on my computer through the MySQL command line client, I can create database information and it's stored on my computer in files. Does this mean that it's initially stored on localhost and then that data is used to create files on my computer? </p>
  
  <p>And then the equivalent of that for the webhost330 is that the localhost stores the database initially but then uploads it to the host at phpMyAdmin? That is the primary thing I'm confused about.</p>