Domain vs. Hosting: Understanding the Basic Elements of a Website
Domain vs. hosting: which is which?
Did you know that on March 15, 1985, Symbolics Inc. paid for the first domain name ever to get registered? That’s only a little over 30 years ago.
Did you also know the first web hosting company wasn’t created until 1994? The company, GeoCities, was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner. It was created as a web hosting and development company in Southern California.
Since then, the need for web hosting services has grown by leaps and bounds. Today, almost 2 billion websites exist. Each requires a unique domain name.
If the terms domain and hosting get jumbled around in your head, we’re here to help. Below, we’ll outline the definition of each term. We’ll also provide you with enough background information that you’ll never confuse the terms again.
Read on to discover more.
Contents
Web Hosting
When a web developer creates a website, she creates it in code. Typically she writes that code languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. That code can get stored on the hard drive of a PC in her house.
Then, if she wished, she could run her website from her hard drive. As long as she had an internet connection, you could check out her site like you would any other website. That’s the way websites were originally maintained: from a local server.
Local Servers
Unfortunately, many problems arise with operating your own local server. To begin with, you may not have enough bandwidth.
You can imagine bandwidth like a freeway. The more lanes you have, the more traffic can drive to and from a destination. Fewer lanes fit less traffic.
The higher your bandwidth, the more internet traffic you can send and receive. When you operate your website on a local server, that traffic comes in the form of visitors to your website. If it’s a popular site, you may need a higher bandwidth than your internet service provider (ISP) offers.
Local servers come with another big problem: downtime. ISPs are notoriously guilty of creating unexpected interruptions in your service. You have no control over these downtimes.
Other problems also exist. Here are a few:
- Maintaining hardware
- Updating software
- Storage space
- Limitations on speed due to geography
Fortunately, innovative minds created a solution to all these problems. Why not create a vault of servers on which other people’s websites could be stored?
Web Hosts
With this solution, only a handful of people could maintain the software and hardware for millions of websites. The company owning the vault could also pay the ISP more money to increase their bandwidth. The ISP could also provide a 24/7 uptime guarantee.
Well, that’s exactly what happened back in 1994 when Bohnett and Rezner founded GeoCities. It provided the first web hosting service. Since then, things have grown more complicated, but the fundamental notions remain the same.
Web hosts store the code for your website on their servers. It’s that simple. Nowadays they also offer additional services:
- Email accounts
- Data security
- FTP Access
- Cloud VPS hosting
- CMS management
- Etc.
Owning and maintaining a website has become an impossibility for most ordinary folks without the help of such services. It requires too much time and expertise in a variety of areas.
Domain Names
You’ve likely heard the term “IP address,” but you may not know what it means. The term refers to the method used to find a particular website. The IP address stands for Internet Protocol address.
IP Addresses
Each IP address is as unique as a fingerprint. They look something like this:
173.194.70.113
If you were to jump on your internet browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, etc.), you can type in this string of periods and numbers. After you type it and hit your [enter] key, the browser will take you to the following site:
Now, why did it do that? We’ll explain in a moment, but there’s something else you need to understand first.
When urban planners create new cities, there’s a reason why they name the streets. They need to call them something so people can refer to them. Also, familiar names and places are easier to remember than nonsensical lists of letters or numbers.
Well, the same holds true for websites. When the internet began, the only way visitors could find a particular website with by using the string of numbers in its IP address. That worked well for the first hundred websites but grew more difficult after the first thousand.
By then, internet users had to refer to a manual the size of a phone book to look up a particular website. This process grew more daunting as the sheer number of websites grew. Imagine how difficult it would be now with almost 2 billion websites.
Memorable Names
Fortunately, someone came up with a solution. They created a system by which a person could substitute a memorable name for an IP address. They called these names “domain names.”
Here are some examples of domain names:
- Google.com
- WordPress.org
- NYTimes.com
By themselves, they’re much easier to read than the long string of numbers in their corresponding IP addresses.
Unfortunately, domain names are often surrounded by other characters in your browser’s address bar. It makes them a bit more confusing. The simple domain names above might look more like this:
- https://ads.google.com/start/?sourceid=awo&subid=us-en-ha-g-aw-a-awc_1
- https://wordpress.org/themes/hestia/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/jellyfish-predators-oceans.html
All the other characters tell the browser how to reach a specific branch of a website. They also tell the browser how to read that information or in what manner it’s organized. Those strings of characters are Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs.
What’s Next?
Now when you compare domain vs. hosting, you’ll know the difference. They’re about as comparable as apples and moon rocks. The confusion often comes from two things.
First, many people simply don’t know the definition of either term. Second, you can now get domain names and web host services from a single provider. HostGator, DreamHost, and GoDaddy are a few.
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