Domain and Website Hosting, What’s the Difference?
Here at UltraWeb marketing, we often get asked “what is the difference between Domain and Website Hosting?” It’s a very common question because Domain and Website Hosting are both important services often sought together. Many times it isn’t clear which aspect of this equation is responsible for which web features you need or are using. Today we’re going to break down domain and website hosting, along with a few other related services.
What is a Domain Name?
A domain name is basically the name of your website i.e. www.websitename.com. A domain name can be purchased from a variety of places such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Google Domains etc.
Domain names usually cost between $8 and $30 per year. This fee is to keep your domain name registered to you or your company and must be paid as long as you want to keep the name. A domain registration fee should not be confused with web hosting fees which are typically a monthly fee.
What is Web Hosting?
A web hosting service is an online type of Internet service, which enables people and organizations to create their own website accessible through the World Wide Web. It allows people and organizations who do not have the money or other resources to invest in buying such website hosting services to access their chosen websites free of charge. There are many options available for you to choose from when it comes to choosing a web hosting provider. The best way to go about selecting the hosting services for your website is to have an understanding of what your website actually needs and how much traffic it can expect on a daily basis.
A web hosting service is usually provided by companies that lease or rent out servers from companies or physical service providers that are capable of providing the needed bandwidth, disk space, and other requirements to maintain and support a website. The amount of traffic a single website can expect on any given day, however, will depend on how large the website is and also the amount of bandwidth it requires. For a smaller online business or an individual who has just launched a new website, it may be best to get a shared hosting plan. This type of plan provides your new website with enough space to upload its files, as well as enough bandwidth to operate normally, with enough disk space to accommodate the amount of data your website uploads on an average day.
There are many types of hosting plans, and one of the most popular ones is the WordPress hosting plan. WordPress websites are known for being user-friendly and for the fact that they are easy to install and customize. Although there are other hosting plans that offer different features, these plans are very popular because they offer high-quality hosting solutions at affordable rates. For example, a small to medium-sized business may find it suitable to use a shared Word press hosting provider for its monthly budget. With the high level of service, affordable monthly fees, and easy installation and customization, Word press websites are considered one of the most popular types of websites in the market today.
What is Self Managed Hosting?
Although you may be paying a company a fee for web hosting, that fee is basically for the use of the physical hardware, storage, and bandwidth needed to keep a website online and available to the public. Most basic and inexpensive hosting plans do not support your website/WordPress Maintenance, Plug-in Maintenance, Security Updates or keeping backups of your website in case of a critical failure. This means that you are solely responsible for the health and maintenance needed to maintain the security and integrity of your website.
What is Advanced Managed Hosting?
UltraWeb Marketing provides an Advanced Backup, Maintenance & Security Hosting Plan that ensures that your website is always backed up, safe, secure and up to date.
This plan includes:
- 24-hour web hosting on our managed server
- SendGrid outgoing mail server
- Free SSL (Google now penalizes non HTTPS sites)
- Daily website backups
- Daily database backups
- Ongoing security patches
- Plug-in updates and WordPress core file updates.
What is Email Hosting?
It’s important to understand Email Hosting and Web hosting are not the same services. Both require their own dedicated data servers and hosting. While you will likely use the same text as your domain name for convenience as your email server addresses, they aren’t the same data housed in the same place, nor are they managed by the same service provider.
All of the data you interact with on the web is stored on high-powered computers called servers, and email data is no different. In fact, email makes up so much web traffic that to be efficient, email data use their own dedicated email servers. That’s why we need email hosting services. These email hosting services, sometimes also referred to as e-mail providers, are simply organizations that control the servers email data is stored on and passes through.
These servers are usually leased from a hosting provider and used to allow users to access the Internet and store and share their own emails. The most common types of email hosting providers are free webmail service (Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail), as well as professional email hosting services such as My Lotus, eFax, Apple Mail, and email service (Exchange, Microsoft Exchange or Yahoo!) Webmail services that run on dedicated server hardware with their own IP address or cluster of IP addresses are usually faster and more robust.
What is an SSL Certificate?
An SSL certificate is important firstly because one is required to be able to securely accept payments online. Additionally, simply having one will cause Google to rank your page much higher which is of course a huge benefit. So what is an SSL Certificate Exactly? In computer security, an SSL Certificate is a kind of digital signature that verifies the authenticity of one or more websites. In cryptography, a private key also referred to as an encryption key, or digital key is a private key that is issued as an encryption key to sign a specific message. Digital certificates are often used in conjunction with an SSL Certificate and private key to create a strong digital guarantee that the message is signed by the person who sent it. This helps prevent anyone from tampering with a computer or sending malicious email to trick the recipient into clicking on a link, or for any other reason. The SSL Certificate lets you know that the website you’re visiting is trusted and that only you and people with whom you have established an account should be able to see the information contained there.
For any more information on these or other services, the team at UltraWeb Marketing would love to talk to you more. To speak to one of our marketing experts about managing your website’s SEO, fill out our contact form or call 800-835-6759 for direct assistance.
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