Domains and Hosting, Explained Once

The distinction that matters

The domain is the name people type. The hosting is the computer holding the files that name points at.

The usual comparison is a street address and a building, and it holds up well. Your address does not contain anything. It tells people where to go. The building holds the contents.

You can move buildings and keep the address. You can keep the building and change the address. They are bought separately, renewed separately, and can be held by different companies who have never heard of each other.

Almost every website problem a small business has starts with not knowing which of the two has gone wrong.

What you are buying with a domain

Not ownership, strictly. The exclusive right to use that name for a period, renewable.

You pay annually, or several years in advance. As long as you keep paying, nobody else can have it. Stop paying and after a grace period it becomes available to anybody.

The registrar is the company you buy it from. They handle the registration and the renewal, and their job is administrative. A registrar does not host anything.

What you should keep: the login, in an account belonging to the business, with a contact address somebody actually reads. That single arrangement prevents most of the disasters in this subject.

What you are buying with hosting

Space on a computer that is connected to the internet permanently, plus the software to serve pages from it.

The measures on the invoice are disk space, which is how much you can store, and bandwidth, which is how much can be sent to visitors in a month. For a small business site both are usually far beyond what you will use.

What actually varies between hosts is less visible: how fast the machine is, how many other sites share it, whether backups happen, and whether anybody answers when something breaks.

Those four are what you are really paying for, and none of them appears in the comparison table.

How they connect

Through a setting called DNS, which is a lookup table.

Somebody types your name. Their computer asks where that name lives. The answer comes from records attached to your domain, which point at your host.

That is the whole mechanism. It means you can change hosts by changing where the domain points, and visitors notice nothing except that the site is now served from somewhere else.

It also means a wrong record breaks everything while both the domain and the hosting are perfectly fine and fully paid.

Where email fits, and why it complicates things

The part that catches people, because it uses the same domain and lives somewhere else entirely.

Your address at your own domain is routed by a separate set of records, pointing at whichever mail provider you use. That may be your host, or a separate service.

The practical consequence is important: changing hosting can break your email if the mail records are not carried across.

It happens constantly. The site moves, everything looks fine, and three days later somebody notices that no enquiries have arrived since Tuesday.

Which is the argument for keeping mail somewhere separate from the site. Then moving one cannot break the other.

Buying them together, and whether to

Most hosts will sell you both, often with the first year of the domain free.

It is convenient and it has one drawback. When you want to leave, the company you are leaving also controls your address, which makes departure slower than it needs to be.

Keeping the domain at a registrar and the hosting elsewhere costs a few dollars more and means you can change host in an afternoon without asking anybody's permission.

For a business that intends to be around for a decade, that separation is worth the small inconvenience.

A worked example

A restaurant whose site went down on a Friday.

The owner phoned the hosting company, who confirmed the account was active and the files were present. He assumed they were wrong, because the site was plainly not loading.

The actual cause was the domain. It had been registered five years earlier on a personal card that had since expired. Two renewal notices went to an email address belonging to a former manager. The name lapsed, and the site with it.

Recovering it during the grace period cost a redemption fee several times the normal renewal, and two days during which the restaurant had no website and no email.

Nothing was wrong with the hosting at any point. Everybody spent Friday looking at the wrong half of the problem.

The four things worth checking today

1. Who the domain is registered to, and whether you can log in.
2. When it expires, and whether auto-renewal is on.
3. Which card is on file, and whether it is still valid.
4. Whether the contact address on the registration reaches somebody.

Those four take ten minutes and prevent the most common way a small business loses its site.

The equivalent for hosting is knowing who provides it, what it costs, when it renews, and where the backups are.

What each one costs

For proportion, since the numbers are small and the consequences are not.

A domain is an annual cost in the region of a takeaway meal. Hosting for a simple business site is a monthly cost somewhere near a phone plan's cheapest tier.

Neither is a figure worth optimising hard. The cheapest hosting available saves a small amount a year and costs you the afternoon your site is down with nobody answering the phone.

Where the money genuinely matters is renewal pricing. Introductory offers on hosting frequently double or triple at the first renewal, and the domain that was free in year one is not free in year two.

Read the renewal figure rather than the headline, on both.

Keeping the record somewhere

One page, wherever you keep operational notes.

Domain, registrar, login, expiry. Host, plan, cost, renewal date. Where email is handled. Who to contact when something breaks.

It takes fifteen minutes and it is the document somebody else needs if you are unreachable, which is a scenario worth designing for even in a business of one.

Gathering that information is part of the preparation covered in what to have ready before you start.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.