In the ‘sometimes’ confusing world of the internet, people often don’t understand that buying a domain name and webhosting are two different things. This is my attempt to break it down in simple terms.
Domain names
Your domain is the name of your website. A domain name is the simplified form of your IP address, which is the equivalent of coordinates on a map, existing of numbers only. But who in the world would remember all those numbers to visit a site? Domain names are the easy way to find and remember websites.
To be more specific, a URL which stands for Uniform Resource Locators, give the exact path to your site or pages.
In order to have your own address, you need to buy or register one.
You can also get a free address with free hosting, but your will be limited in your choice of how you want to name your site.
For example: your own address may look like this: www.myname.com.
A free address could be anything like: www.myname.theirname.com or www.theirname.com/myname.
Nothing wrong with free sites if you want one for fun, to share your stories or photos. For business purposes however, it is not the right thing to do because 1) it does not look professional and 2) shows that you can’t afford to buy a domain and hosting.
So if you want to attract clients, go for your own name!
Click here for a more technical explanation of domain names on Wikipedia.
Webhosting
Now you have a domain name for your website, but where will you store your site’s information? Webhosting is like renting space on the internet to set up shop. That’s where your website and webcontent will be residing. Your webhost then makes your site visible on the internet, so that the rest of the world can see your beautiful website too.
There are several ways to host your site. You can pay for hosting on a shared server, which means that other websites are also hosted on the same server (hosting machine). Each site gets their own account on the server, like multiple company offices in one building. If you expect high traffic, you may want to go with a dedicated server, which will host only your site. This is like renting the entire building for your business and logically costs more than shared hosting. There is also free hosting, but your options are limited as this ties in to free domain names as mentioned earlier.
For more details on webhosting go to this link on Wikipedia.
Celebrate and take advantage of the Independence Day discount on web or blog services starting tomorrow, 4th of July.