Domain Names & Hosting – What’s The Difference?

Definitely not!

We do a lot of educating with our clients and this is a common confusion point.

It’s important to know the difference between the two and being the business owner, you should definitely have access to these.

We always make sure our clients have complete ownership of their online marketing and we want to educate them to make sure they know what they should have access to.

There was a good year into being trained by Sky, and I myself didn’t really quite understand the difference. His explanation really helped, and I’ve used it to this day when explaining to our clients.

Domain

Short and simple; your domain is like your home address.
(If you want to learn more about buying domains and what that looks like, check out our other post here!)

• If I’m trying to find your home, I’m going to open my GPS on my phone and type in your physical address so that it can take me to your house.
• If I’m trying to find your website, I’m going to type in your domain/URL in the address bar to be taken to your site.

Hosting

You are renting space on a computer to store your website files. When the internet was still new, you could create your website on your personal computer; which meant that’s where it was being stored. If someone across the world was looking at your website and you turned off your computer for the night — the website would also turn off and that person wouldn’t have anything to look at anymore!

• Before you start building your home, you first need a plot of land and foundation. THEN you are able to start framing and building the actual home.
• Before you start building a website, you first need a “foundation” for the website to be built upon. Just like your house doesn’t sit on land for free and property taxes are a thing, you also have to pay for website hosting where your website is being stored and safe.

How They Work Together

You first need to setup a host before you can even begin creating your website. After your website is ready to go live, that’s when you access your domain name and point it to the website you just created by updating your DNS settings. They are two very separate pieces but they’re meant to work together! You can even buy multiple domains and have them all pointing to your one website.

We hope this helped!
Let us know if you have any questions by reaching out through our contact form; thanks!