Hosting forms an essential part of the website building process and involves setting up and storing your website besides providing it with a name and address. Depending on what aspect of hosting you are looking for, hosting service providers offer web hosting as well as domain hosting plans. Businesses or individuals looking to set up a website of their own need to buy domain and hosting services for ensuring that their website goes live and is reachable.
Distinguishing Between Web Hosting and Domain Hosting
While both web hosting and domain hosting are closely related, they refer to two different services. Web hosting companies allow their clients to create and store content or webpages on their servers while the domain hosts provide the websites with a name and address which helps visitors to access the content. So when you choose web hosting you are hiring a place for your website and its content whether it is data, images or videos. The service provider provides you access to computing resources such as disk space, CPU, memory and bandwidth that allow your webpages and other content to be stored on their server.
But merely storing or hosting a website is not enough to reach your targeted audience. You need to provide them with a name and address to search for. This is where domain hosting comes in. Your website’s domain name could be reflective of your business and thus help people to locate it easily. So when you buy domain hosting you are buying an address for your website so that the targeted audience can easily search and locate you over the internet.
Many web hosting companies offer website hosting plans that include both web hosting and domain hosting services.
How Web Hosting and Domain Hosting Work Together?
To build and run a website successfully you need both domain hosting and web hosting. You need to start by buying a domain name which is generally available for a specific period. The next step in the process of building and operating your website is to update your domain name settings and point them to your web hosting service provider. This will ensure that when people search for your website by typing its domain name they are directed towards your webpages stored on the hosting company’s server.
You can choose to buy domain hosting and web hosting from two different companies or opt for a single package including both the services. You can take your decision after comparing domain and hosting price quotations of different hosting companies. The cost of buying domain from one company and web hosting from another turns out to be higher than the cost of buying a hosting plan that includes both. Good hosting companies offer hosting plans that often include a free domain, a security certificate, additional domain, malware scans and the option to upscale your resources when required.
In case you already own a domain name, you can easily get it transferred to your web hosting company for easy management. So get ready to choose a good hosting plan for your website and make it live.
