Web 101, Hosting, and domain names, how they work together?
Hello! welcome to
The Engineering Projects. Are you a business owner? A content creator? A college student looking for a place of free expression? Then do not worry! All you need to take your ambitions to the next level is a new website to establish a substantial internet presence from the first day of your new adventure.
Having a website is an excellent way to increase community engagement and have a platform that exists solely for your work to be visible to the general audience. However, if you’ve been thinking and going around the internet to look for a procedure, there’s a strong
chance that you’re feeling overwhelmed right now.
Complicated words like web hosting and choosing a domain name scare away a newcomer. Hence, we’re here to help you figure out the process of making your website and clear all your confusions surrounding the matter. What do you need for a website? It sounds like a simple question, and we’ll try to give you a simple answer to it. To have a website up and running, you essentially need two things to begin. They are:
- Domain Name.
- Web hosting service.
We will go into great detail about these terms because these two terms will pop up at every step of the way, and you will need a comprehensive understanding of what they mean. For now, you should know that a domain name and a web hosting service is crucial to your beginning. While both are two different things and completely unrelated, they cannot function without one another.
Understanding a domain name
A domain name is the name of your website. An excellent way to understand what it means is to think of it as the address where people can access your website. Technically, it is used for finding and identifying IP addresses on the internet. IP addresses are convenient for computers but hard for us to remember for a long time. Because of this, domain names were created and are now used to identify entities on the internet.
You have to pick a domain name for your website and then get it registered against your credentials to reserve it for your use. Usually, buying a domain name allows you to use it for a year, but you can always pay in advance and look up offers and discounts to lock up your domain name for years to come.
However, buying a domain name does not mean getting an entire website. You still have to get web hosting and get a website designed from scratch by a reliable web design agency. Keep some things in mind while buying a domain name. Think long and hard to pick the right domain name because it will be visible everywhere, and your regular users will remember it. In case you discover that your preferred domain name is unavailable, you can always use a temporary one till your preferred option becomes available.
What is web hosting?
A web host is essentially a company that has many devices connected to the internet. When you upload your web pages on their systems, everyone across the world will be able to connect, view, and use them.
You will need to sign up for an account with a web host to give your website a home for its files and functioning. Take this analogy for a simpler understanding. If a domain name is similar to getting a business name in the ordinary world, getting a web hosting account is equivalent to renting an office or shop premises for your business operations and inventory. Selecting a web hosting company is much more complicated than choosing a domain name.
Choosing the right web hosting service is a lengthy task that requires a lot of research. People choose different web hosts based on their particular needs, and you need to identify your requirements to select a service that works for you.
How do you pick the right web hosting service?
Before we begin, you should know that there are two types of web hosting services - free and commercial. Free web hosting services allow you to host your website on the internet without any charge, whereas you have to pay a subscription charge if you avail of commercial web hosting solutions. There are advantages and disadvantages to both solutions. Let’s try to go through the most critical differences so that you can decide which hosting solution fits your needs.
A free web hosting solution usually imposes advertising on your website. Companies hire
advertising agencies to cover the costs of providing your site the free web-space and associated services. It also allows them to earn revenue through the traffic on your website and profit over time. Some services place a banner on your pages, while others display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads. Some solutions even pose a pop-up on your website randomly.
Ensure that you are comfortable with their mode of advertising beforehand. Also, free hosting solutions only give you a limited amount of cloud space, and the storage limits put a cap on your website’s contents. You may not be able to have many images and videos on your website in a limited cloud space.
A commercial web hosting service will allow your users to have an ad-free experience on your website. Moreover, in some hosting services, you can also have the option to put ads on your website and directly earn revenue through ad traffic. Most blog writers make a living through ad traffic on their websites. It will also allow you to select the amount of storage space you want for your website. As you keep updating your website, it is bound to get heavier and see the entry of additional web pages. In this case, you can always select higher cloud storage with the company.
Moreover, be on the lookout for their bandwidth/data transfer. It correlates how to the speed of your website’s opening and the number of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. Carefully go through the bandwidth terms and conditions of your provider to see any hidden costs attached.