When you decide to own a website, then you may need to have web hosting, a domain name, and a developed site. By now you may be wondering what a domain name and web hosting are all about. Well, domain hosting and web hosting while closely related are pretty two different services.
Web hosting companies can allow you to create and keep content on their internet servers. On the other hand, domain hosting companies offer domain names to help visitors access the web content. This page explains what it means to have a domain name and website hosting.
Domain name
Domain name refers to the website’s address that users type in the browser’s URL bar to get to your site. In other words, if your site was a house, it means the domain name can be its address.
Keep in mind that the internet is a giant network of interconnected computers, so to identify them easily, each computer has a series of numbers known as IP addresses. Therefore, this IP address consists of a combination of numbers that are separated by dots.
While computers don’t have any problem identifying and remembering the numbers, people can’t remember and utilize these numbers to assist them to connect to sites on the internet. To solve this issue, domain names were created.
You see, a domain name can have words to make it easy to remember the site addresses. Now, if you decide to visit a site on the internet, there is no need to type a series of numbers. Instead, you can just type a domain name that is easy to remember.
Web hosting
Web hosting is an area where all your site’s files are stored. You can think about this place as the home of your site where it lives. The best way to think about this is the domain name can be like the address of your home and the web hosting is the home that address is directing. So all sites on the internet should have web hosting. You can read a few reviews for Australian web hosts.
Once a visitor enters the domain name in a browser, then the domain name is changed into the IP address of the website hosting company’s computer. In this case, the computer has all your site’s files, so it sends these files to the user’s browser. Web hosting companies know how to store and serve sites. They can offer various types of hosting plans to their clients.
As explained earlier, web hosting and domain names are different services, though they work together for the site to function. Ideally, a domain name needs to be updated regularly, and behind a domain name, there is usually a web hosting service’s address for storing the site’s files. Without having a domain name, then users can’t find your site, and without website hosting, you cannot create a site.