It’s common for newbies to confuse between a domain name with a web hosting. However, it’s very important for you to be clear on the difference before you move any forward in hosting your very first website.

Domain name and web hosting explained

A domain name, is like the address of your home; web hosting on the other hand, is the space of your house where you place your furniture. Instead of street name and area code, set of words or/and numbers are used for the website’s naming’. The same goes with hosting, computer hard disk and computer memory are used instead of instead of wood and steel for storing as well as processing data files.

Domain Name

When you register a domain, it gives you sole ownership and rights to the name of your site. No one else in the market has the access to the actual name of that particular domain besides you.

However, just because you have a domain does not mean that you can server a website to the world. To run a website, you will neeed a domain name, and a configured web server to put up a website.

Learn more about domain.

Web Hosting

A web hosting is normally known as a service that provides web server (where you store your files at), along with its network connectiong, configuration, and its maintainance. You just need to upload your site to the server and configure your email via an online account control panel.

To learn more about web hosting, read our previous class note here.

Learn more about web hosting.

Next topic in web hosting 101 classroom

Alright, you have learned about web hosting and domain name. Now what if you already registered your domain and ready to start off a new website? What kind of hosting should you go with? Well basically you’ll only have two choices: a dedicated server hosting; or a shared hosting (aka, virtual hosting). As shared hosting is the most popular hosting type used in the world, we’ll review what’s a shared hosting in detail ; and we’ll check out what differs a dedicated server and a shared server hosting.