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When Shakespeare wrote the famous line – what’s in a name, he delicately unpacked that a name is not really important and does not alter the actual essence of the object. As much as we love Shakespeare and his genius, we might have to disagree with him on this point.
In the world of online commerce and digital interactions, a name is in fact, very important. Your domain name is a strong marketing tool for your business, and one of the first points that your customers and potential customers will contact and interact with you on.
But, if you are new in the world of domains, website hosting, and online business, you might not know that there is a difference between domain names and website hosting. Don’t worry, you are not alone. In fact, it can all get quite technical and there can be a lot of different aspects that you need to know about and understand.
This is where we thought we would step in to help. Below, we unpack the key aspects of domain names as well as website hosting and just how you can create a successful online business. Let’s jump straight in.
The Difference Between Domain Names and Domain Hosting
We thought we would start with what the exact differences are between the two. A domain name is an actual name chosen for your address that will take your visitors to your website. www.google.com is an actual domain name, as what the address of your home would be, like 230 Beach Road, for example.
The domain hosting, on the other hand, is the rented space that is situated on a server that contains all of your website’s files. So, website hosting is essentially the home of the website where everything exists. You will be able to access the servers where the files are located with the domain name.
In order to have a website for your company, you will need both website hosting and a domain name to run successfully. In certain cases, you can acquire these from two different companies, but there are also many companies that can provide you with both services in one offering.
You typically purchase a website from a provider and renew it annually at a set fee. Luckily, depending on the name you choose, you can actually find cheap domains to purchase which will include everything you need to successfully run your site.
How to Choose a Domain Name?
There are various things that you need to take into consideration when choosing your domain name. As mentioned earlier, your name is a very strong marketing tool and will need to accentuate your brand. So, the first thing to consider is to ensure that your domain name is short, simple, and easy for your customer to remember.
It will also need to reflect the products and services that your company is offering, so work toward ensuring it is aligned with your brand and contains a keyword relating to your offering. Not only will this be advantageous for your customer, but it will heighten your SEO rankings when Google scrapes your site to know where to place you.
The next thing to consider is the domain extension. This is the suffix of the domain name, or the .com or .org. You might not think too much about the extension, but it can actually make a huge difference when it comes to customers searching for your site. .com is more popular in searches, and people naturally gravitate toward ending a search in .com. If you have chosen another extension, you could possibly be losing traffic to the domain ending in .com.
How To Register the Domain Name and Host Your Site?
The next thing you need to look at is actually getting your domain registered. There are a number of domain name registrars that you can look at to buy a domain name. These names do fluctuate in price, depending on the popularity, the suffix, and the simplicity of a name. Statistics show that there are over 1.7 billion websites currently active on the world wide web, so chances of your first choice being available are incredibly low. Do not give up hope too quickly, however, as these could expire and you could land the name if the current owner does not renew the contract.
Your next step will be to buy a hosting plan and link it with your domain name. You can then install website software to actually create and manage your website and expand on that by installing tools and plugins. Your last step would be to add content to your site.
In order to make the process a bit easier, you can actually buy the domain name and website hosting services from the same company. This will mean that you won’t need to transfer or change any domain names. In most cases, you will also usually be given email addresses too, making your initial setup much more simplified. It is usually cheaper to buy the two in one as it combines the two different costs into a one-off monthly or annual cost.
How To Select a Hosting Plan?
There are five things that you need to consider when choosing a plan:
- Data Storage. This is the amount of data that the host can send from your website to your visitors on a monthly basis. Most should offer unlimited storage, so double-check that before purchasing;
- Uptime refers to the amount of time that your website is guaranteed to be online. Most should be offering 99.9% of uptime;
- You can choose a plan that does or does not offer security services. This offering may come at an extra price, but it could protect you from hacking and fraud;
- It is incredibly important to find out from your provider whether you can conduct automatic and regular updates with your hosting service to have a recent restore point.
Last Thoughts
Before jumping into buying domain names and hosting services, do some research into your various options first. If you cannot get your first option of name, for example, shop around until you find something that will suit your company and brand. The same goes for your hosting service. If it is just easier to combine both of these services into one centralized point, try to do so. It will naturally depend on the nature of your site and your requirements for the site and what you would like to achieve with it. But, for those just getting started in the online world of eCommerce, consider the option that allows you to do everything in one place, and grow from there.