Web Hosting vs. Domain Hosting
Hosting is broader that you would think. The problem that most people run into when trying to select a host is that they really don’t know what a host is. There are two main types of hosting, Web Hosting and Domain Hosting. Some hosting companies can do both while others are better at one than another.
Web Hosting
Web Hosting is when someone rents you on a monthly basis disc space on their servers which are persistently connected to the internet. To run a web site you must have a persistent connection to the internet or else your site cannot be accessed. If you have a solid connection at home and a reliable computer then you can even host your own sites, but if your hard drive crashes or your power goes out, your site goes down. Often times it’s not worth the hassle of hosting your own site, and Web Hosting can be very inexpensive.
Domain Hosting
To understand Domain Hosting you must first understand domains. Like I spoke about in the previous paragraph, you must have a computer persistently connected to the internet. Every computer connected to the internet has an IP address which looks something like 11.111.11.111 and it is a group of numbers. You web host has servers or computers especially made for hosting websites connected to the internet and every server has a different IP address. If you know the IP address of your server you can often times access your site just with the IP address. What a domain does is that it takes a word or phrase with an extension like .com and assigns it to an IP address. Your host then has something called a Domain Name Server (DNS) that keeps track of where your site is located on the server. That is why often times when you purchase a domain it ask for your DNS information so it knows where to look for your website.
So in a nutshell now understanding how a domain fits into web hosting, all a domain name is all about is that is a nickname more or less used to identify the IP address of the server your site is on. You define the Name Servers in your Domain Control Panel, and your host does the rest.
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