Introduction:
When you talk about getting a website on the web, you usually encounter the two terms i.e. domain and hosting. So what are these two terms? And much more stuff related to the websites, everything I am gonna cover in this post.
According to siteefy.com, till January 2021 there were 1,197,982,359 websites present around the world. Out of which 199,533,484 websites were active. So this is a huge number and it is still growing day by day. So now let’s deep dive into our first topic i.e. the domains.
What is a domain name?
A domain of a website is nothing but the name of the website. I am using an analogy of a house, and this is the simplest one. In which if you consider your house as a website then the address of your house will be the domain name.
Moreover, the first Internet domain name “symbolics.com” was registered by Symbolics on March 15, 1985. It was a Massachusetts computer company.
When talking about the internet, it is the giant network of computers connected with each other across the globe. And on the internet, each and every connected computer is identified by its IP address. So now what is the IP address? A particular IP address is a sequence of numbers separated by dots (.). So 66.249.66.3 is an example of a typical IP address.
Moreover, Just imagine that you want to access your favourite sites but you can only put the IP addresses of the websites which you want to visit online. Then this will become the biggest problem for every user around the world. So to remove this problem the system of domain names exists. And domain names are easy to remember and use when compared to the website’s IP address.
Top-level and second-level domain:
Let’s take the example of google.com, so the “google” is a Second-Level Domain also known as SLD in short. On the other hand, “.com” is referred to as Top-Level Domain or TLD. Also, Domain Suffix is another name of TLD. The other popular examples of TLDs are .gov, .org, .net, .mil, .edu, and .biz. And we have seen .com TLD in the example above.
In addition to that, I am providing some of the original explanations of the TLDs below:
- .com — Commercial businesses.
- .org — Organizations (generally charitable).
- .net — Network organizations.
- .gov —U.S. government agencies.
- .mil —Military.
- .edu —Educational facilities, like universities.
- .biz —Businesses.
- .in — India.
- .th — Thailand.
- .ca — Canada.
- .au — Australia.
and so on.
If you want to purchase a domain name for your business then there are several companies that register the domain(s) for you. And that includes Godaddy, Hostinger, Hostgator, Bluehost, NameCheap etc. Domain rates vary from company to company along with that TLDs are also one of the factors for the price difference. For example, you can find domain names with the “.xyz” domain suffix to be cheaper than domain names with the “.com” domain suffix.
What is Web hosting?
Now the next topic in this blog post is about hosting. So What is hosting? In simple terms, web hosting is the place where website files are stored. It is the home for all of your website contents be it HTML files, images, pdfs. Since domain names cannot be utilized alone. So many domain registrars (Those companies that can register domain names) also provide different web hosting services as per user needs.
Suppose someone wants to start his/her web hosting company. Then that person is required to purchase the reseller hosting plan. Almost every hosting company provides a reseller hosting plan. The resources that are bought in the plan are divided among the customers as decided by the owner.
There are also other hosting plans that are available such as cloud hosting, WordPress Hosting( hosting specifically tailored for WordPress CMS I will talk about that later in this post), cPanel hosting, VPS hosting etc.
What after domain and hosting?
After getting the domain and hosting, you can build your own site by coding yourself. If not you can alternatively use a site builder to build your website. But in the case of site builders, you can get it with the hosting package in some hosting providers and in others, it is available as a paid plan. So it varies from company to company.
As I have talked earlier about website builders in this post. There is also possible to create your websites with the help of CMS. CMS is short for Content Management System. Popular examples of CMS are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Prestashop, and so on.
Among all of these WordPress is the most popular Content Management System. As there are 64 million WordPress websites are present. And also 661 WordPress sites go live each and every day. I am using WordPress websites for years. And from my experience, it can be used for almost any kind of website.
Like for example, you want to build an eCommerce website you can do so by using woocommerce. In addition to that if you want to build a community website you can do that as well. Depending upon the use cases there can be several others.
WordPress websites functionality can be easily extended with the help of plugins. Almost for all necessary requirements, there are plugins for that. Furthermore, Plugins are accessible from the WordPress admin panel. One can also buy the plugins from the marketplaces like Themeforest.net.
Not only plugins, but various free WordPress themes are also available in the Admin panel. With which one can easily change the look and feel of WordPress websites with a single click. Themes can also be purchased as per requirement.
Conclusion:
We can conclude that a good knowledge of domain and hosting can help you in setting up your online business. Also, we cannot ignore the importance of WordPress Content Management Systems, and the facilities that it provides. And that’s all for this post, I hope this post has clarified the concept of domain and hosting. If it helped please consider sharing it with your friends and family. And thanks for reading the post. See you in the next one.
Featured Image credit: Edited from Technology vector created by stories – www.freepik.com
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