A Simple Guide

Having a website hosted correctly can be anywhere from very simple to extremely complicated. A simple example would be hosting and creating your site with a website builder. Some website builders like Squarespace offer domain registration, Hosting, and website templates that help to reduce the work on your end to simply inputting text and images.

Having all of these features with one provider is great and makes the process of creating a website very easy. On the opposite end of the spectrum, each of those services could be handled by completely different companies, each with their own account. Let’s take a step back and look at these terms:

Domain Registration: Say you would like to have a website with a domain of www.iron-man.com. Well, fist you would check online to see if someone is already using it (which they are). If it is up for grabs then you go ahead and purchase it. When you purchase a domain you are really just leasing/renting it for however long you wish to keep paying for it. Purchasing the domain is the same as registering it. Where you purchase it from is called the domain registrar, basically the domains landlord.

Hosting: This is where all of your files that the website uses are located. Hosting services provide partitioned room on a server that will contain your website files. There are many different types of hosting, such as cloud hosting where there is no physical server but a cloud based one. There is also dedicated server hosting where you have a separate server just for your site. A shared hosting plan, which is the most common, will not only contain the files for your site but it also has the possibility of hosting multiple sites on a similar hosting plan.

Now that we are more familiar with these terms we can start scratching the surface of how complicated owning and operating a website can be. Here is a short and simple breakdown of how certain hosting and registration services communicate:

If I am browsing the web and I go to iron-man.com, the browser will find your domain registrar and locate the name servers, the name servers then specify the DNS Zone Records, and the Zone Records will point to a specific IP (Wherever the site is hosted). Each of these steps can be in different places with different companies and logins. If you currently have a website but aren’t the one paying for the domain registration then you are liable to have the domain taken from you by whoever is paying for the registration and the same goes for hosting.

So, as you can see, it’s pretty crucial that you are fully aware of where and how your domain is registered and hosted, and who has control over it. There are some services that will provide you with information about the domain and where it is hosted, but there are certain hosting settings that can hide this info from these services. If you allow anyone access to this information, make sure they’re someone that you can trust AND that you always maintain primary ownership of your hosting and domain registration – trust us when we say it’s VERY IMPORTANT!