If you are just starting up your blog, a few things can be tricky to understand. Many new bloggers find themselves confused between a Domain Name and Web Hosting, which is nothing new.
In this guide, we will try to understand what domain and hosting mean in blogging. So if you are a blogger-to-be, you must check out what this post has to offer.
We believe it is best to start from scratch when you are a rookie, so first, we will begin with the general idea of blogging and what a blog is. A blog is an abbreviated version of the word ‘weblog’, which is nothing but a website containing creative and/or informational content for visitors to view and read.
Thus blogging is creating written content for blogs. The best blogs are constantly updated with newer and better content. Taking one step at a time, let us understand what your domain name means.
Table of Contents
What is a Domain Name?
The Domain Name is the address of your website, one that people type on the URL bar of a browser to access your website. This helps us to remember the website by its name.
In the most rudimentary terms, the internet is a massive network of computers connected via cables. Thus to identify them easily, every computer is assigned an IP address consisting of numbers separated by dots.
While computers have no problem remembering and identifying these numbers, it is a whole different story for us humans.
With a Domain Name with words, it becomes much easier for us to remember the unique names of the websites we want to access. We can simply type the domain name to search on a browser.
Domain Hosting refers to the services offered by various domain hosting providers, called domain hosts.
Imagine your domain name (say ‘myblog’) as the name of a folder present in your domain host’s server. It would be located at myblog.yourhostsname.com, and every webpage that your site contains is stored within that folder.
So if you have a page called “My Vacations”, then the address for that page would be something like myblog.yourhostsname.com/myvacations.
What is Web Hosting?
Web Hosting refers to the website hosting services provided by various web hosting companies or web hosts. For a better understanding, let us take an analogy. Imagine that your web content is your store.
Then web hosting will provide you with the physical space required for displaying your products to the entire world.
When a user enters your Domain Name in a browser, it is first translated into the IP address of your hosting provider’s computer.
These companies specialize in serving and storing websites. Thus this computer contains your website’s file, and on getting the access request from the browser, it sends those files back to the user’s Search Engine Results Page.
How are Domain Name and Web Hosting related?
As we can see, Domain Hosting and Web Hosting are two different services. However, the concepts are much related than one can perceive. They work together to run websites and blogs.
If you want to understand their relation, you will have to consider your domain name as your home’s address. Then web hosting can be seen as the brick-and-mortar house itself.
A domain name system is a massive address book containing millions of domain names along with the associated web host’s address, thus storing the website’s files. People cannot find your website without a domain name, and you need web hosting to build your website.
This is why you need both to build your blog. If you buy only the domain name, you will get the right to use that domain name for a certain period, usually about a year or so. However, you need to store your website’s files, and so you also need web hosting.
Once you get a web host, you will have to update your domain name settings to point to your web host’s server. You can either buy them from the same provider as most of them offer the domain and web hosting packages, or you can buy them separately.
In the second case, you will have to update the domain name settings as told above, but if you are buying from the same provider, you won’t have to worry about that.
Top Domain & Web Hosting Providers
CloudHostWorld
One of the best global web-hosting providers, CloudHostWorld offers various lucrative WordPress hosting plans. WordPress is one of the widely popular blogging platforms in the market, and with WP-CLI integrated SSH access, CloudHostWorld has the perfect plans for your blogging needs. WordPress officially recommends them for site owners.
Now that you know what domain hosting means for a blog and how they work in tandem, it is time for you to choose your web host and get started on your blogs. But if you want to make money from blogging, you will need to buy a domain name and hosting for your blogs.
ALSO READ : 10 Tips To Improve Security Of Your WordPress Website
