Domain vs Hosting vs Website

Credits: Shirsendu Das Hello people, welcome to our blog. If you are new to web technology field please read this blog from start to end to make your basic idea clear about domain, web hosting and a website. We all know that domain name, web hosting and website are interrelated to each other. Without one, the other two has no importance. Let’s start our discussion with domain name, then web hosting and at last website.

Domain:

A domain name, is like the address of your home. Instead of street name and area code, set of words or/and numbers are used to indicate the website’s name. Computer hard disk and computer memory are used instead of wood and steel for storing and processing data files.

A domain name refers to the named address or identification label for your location on the internet. The domain name allows others to access your website directly with an easy to remember address instead of using a numeric IP address.

Every machine on a network has a unique identifier. Just as you would address a letter to send in the mail, computers use the unique identifier to send data to specific computers on a network. Most networks today, including all computers on the Internet, use the TCP/IP protocol as the standard for how to communicate on the network. In the TCP/IP protocol, the unique identifier for a computer is called its IP address. IP addresses look like this:173.194.70.113

If you type in your favorite browser (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, etc.) the above IP address, you will see google.com.

It is almost impossible for a person to remember hundreds of IP addresses for all the sites they want to visit every day. This is where the domain names come into play. A domain name is an easy-to-remember address of a website. You would rather type “google.com” than 173.194.70.113 in your browser. But they both lead to the same web site. Registering a domain name secures that specific internet address. No one else can use that particular domain name on the internet. Several companies offer stand-alone domain name registration. This allows you to secure a domain name without purchasing web hosting services. While this will protect your domain name from being taken by someone else, it will not allow you to host a website or utilize email services with your domain. All domain names are unique. This means there can be only one google.com in the world. You cannot register a name once it is registered by others.

***How to choose your domain?***

Web Hosting:

\Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to store as a file/files a website or web page onto the Internet. A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet. Websites are hosted or stored, on special computers called servers. When Internet users want to view your website, all they need to do is to type your website address or domain into their browser. Their computer will then connect to your server and your web pages will be delivered to them through the browser. Most hosting companies require that you own your domain in order to host with them. If you do not have a domain, the hosting companies will help you purchase one. Web hosting makes it possible for visitors to view your site’s content when they type in your domain name. But a Web hosting service accomplishes much more than that. It can help keep your site up — and running smoothly — 24/7. This is especially important in the competitive e-commerce marketplace, where interrupted availability may cause you to lose not only sales but also customers who will leave your site after a negative experience and perhaps never come back.

Now we will talk about the most common types of web hosting plans. There are commonly 8 types of web hosting They are:

1. Shared Web Hosting
2. Reseller Web Hosting
3. Cloud-Based Web Hosting
4. Virtual Private Server (VPS) Web Hosting
5. Dedicated Web Server Web Hosting
6. Colocation Web Hosting
7. Self Service Web Hosting
8. Managed WordPress Hosting

In my future blog, I will discuss each of the above in details.

Website:

A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are google.com, shirsendu.com, amazon.com and many more. A company or an individual tells you how to get to their Website by giving you the address of their home page. From the home page, you can go through to all the other pages of their site. For example, the Website for Shirsendu.com has the home page address of https://shirsendu.com. (The home page address actually includes a specific file name like index.html but, as in our case, when a standard default name is set up, users don’t have to enter the file name.) Shirsendu.com home page address leads to thousands of pages. (But a Web site can also be just a few pages.) A website may be accessible via a public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet, or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site. Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can be a personal website, a corporate website for a company, a government website, website of an organization etc. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and education. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web(WWW), while private websites, such as a company’s website for its employees, are typically a part of an intranet. Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents, typically composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, XHTML). They may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors. Web pages are accessed and transported with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (HTTP Secure, HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user. The user’s application, often a web browser, renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal.\\

There are basically two main types of website –

1. Static
2. Dynamic.

A static site is one that is usually written in plain HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) and what is in the code of the page is what is displayed to the user. A dynamic site is one that is written using a server-side scripting language such as PHP, ASP, JSP etc. In such a site the content is called by the scripting language from other files and/or database depending on actions taken by the user.

We will discuss more about static vs dynamic website in our future blog. So readers now you know about domain name, web hosting and website. Basically, each of these three can not run without each other. You can choose any good company for purchasing a domain name, web hosting. But if you want to build your website, contact Shirsendu and Team, Web designing and web development company, one of the best web designing and development company working with excellence since a decade. We create websites for our customers both local and worldwide, maintain their website and make our customers happy.