We are often asked by our clients to explain the difference with website, domains and hosting. Many starters don’t know that there are differences between websites, domains and hosting.
What Is Website?
A website contains interlinked web pages that contribute to a single domain name which provides accessible information that we wish to announce to the public. Websites can be designed and created by an individual, an organization or a group for different purposes. Web pages consist of a mixture of text and medias and are not bound by any rules in creation of a website.
However, most web pages are designed base on a standard rule of thumb which consist of home page that links off to other categories and content within the same website. Creating a website needs to be properly executed and plan as these pages and sites contribute to the SEO and SEM game in today’s digital world. They help us to be ranked among the others, gaining high visibility and click through rate which leads to good conversion and profit.
What Is Domain?
Domain name is known as a name used in web pages that people normally type into the web browser’s URL bar to visit your site. For example, if your website was a house, your domain name would be the address of your house.
Without domain names, we would be remembering IP addresses such as 1.1.1.1. Thus, to better facilitate us in remembering such IP addresses, domain names were invented. Now, we would like to visit a website on the internet, we do not need to key in strings of number such as 1.1.1.1. Instead, a alphabetical wording would do the job such as adssentialmarketing.com. By entering these strings of alphabet in a web browser, it would trigger a request to global network of servers that form Domain Name System (DNS). These servers will look up for name server associated to this domain and forward the request back to our browser. It works similarly like a phone book, name servers are like phone book that stores contact numbers. Thus by searching for a particular person, our phone book will pull out a record and return us a string of numbers.
There are also different extensions of domain names available, such as top level domain names (TLD), country code top level domain names (ccTLC) and sponsored top level domain names (sTLD). These domain names are controlled and manage by a non-profit organization known as internet corporation for assigned names and numbers (ICANN). ICANN gives permission to companies called Domain Name Registrars to sell and manage domain names on our behalf.
What is Hosting?
A hosting is a place where all files and information are stored. When a domain name is entered into the browser, it will thus check for your web files hosted based on ip addresses. Upon looking up these ip addresses, it will return files and information that is within this ipaddress to our browser. With a hosting plan or storage, we would be able to create websites, store information, databases and many more. Domain names and hosting are two separate services that acts differently. However, they work together to make websites possible.