The online world can be a little complex once you take a peek underneath the hood. While things might seem pretty straightforward to the end-user, there’s a lot of technical works behind the scenes that has to be in place before you can visit your favorite site.
Should you be running a website, or planning on doing so, you will have to get familiar with some of these inner workings.
One of the basic things you will have to wrap your head around is with regard to hosting nameservers.
In this article we’ll be looking at what are exactly hosting nameservers, how to get your domain set up on one of them, as well a sample of the popular hosting nameserver providers out there for you to consider.
Let’s get right into it.
What Are Hosting Nameservers?
These are basically specialized servers on the internet whose purpose is to handle requests or queries from your computer about the location of a particular domain’s various services.
You can think of them as the equivalent of internet phone books, in a way.
Let’s say you wanted to call up a friend you hadn’t spoken with in a while, even if you thought you remembered their phone number, you probably would want to double check it in your phone book before dialing them up.
It’s more-or-less the same thing here.
When you type in abcdefg.com into your computer’s browser, your computer will send a request to the abcdefg.com nameservers, which will then respond with a specific IP address matching the exact page you are looking for such as 123.456.789.123. It is this IP address that your computer then uses to retrieve the page data you were searching for.
It’s a lot easier to remember website names than IP addresses, which is why nameservers exist.
If your computer had the IP address saved somewhere it wouldn’t need to go through this process, but it makes things a lot easier.
How To Get Set Up with a Hosting Nameserver?
If you’re just beginning the process of setting up your online presence, then you’ll need to start from the very beginning.
This involves selecting and purchasing (renting) a domain name under which your website will be registered.
This will be relatively cheap, with a common price for regular domain names running at around $10 per year.
You have to renew your domain every year, unless you buy it for a number of years in advance, which usually makes it cheaper in the long run.
You have the option of getting your domain name and have your hosting done by the same outfit but there are differences in the way these services work, and so it is more common to have your domain registration and web hosting done separately.
Once you’ve got your domain name in hand, you now have to make the decision of which hosting service you would like to be registered under.
This is the equivalent of choosing which phone book to place your address in.
It makes a bigger difference than you might expect.
Selecting a Hosting Nameserver and host
It might not seem like it for the average website operator, but not all hosting nameservers are created equal, and it’s an important decision to make.
There are a lot of considerations to be made in this regard, and each one of us has to weigh out the options available in order to come to a decision that best reflects their needs and capabilities.
Here are some of the factors to consider:
- Access speed,
- security rating,
- hosting price, and
- technical support services.
When you choose to go for public hosting DNS registrars, you will be saving a bit of money on hosting fees, but you will be sorely disadvantaged in the other areas, which is why many people nowadays are going for hosting nameservers.
Here are a couple of popular hosting nameservers you can look into and make your pick among:
iPage
This provider offers up an attractive package that includes unlimited bandwidth capabilities , free-of-charge round-the-clock customer support based in North America, as well as up-time and money-back guarantees.
Domain.com
These guys offer you U.S. based customer support, competitive prices, inclusive web hosting prices, and are a great pace for finding domain names.
Sitelio
This is a great host for photographers and designers. They offer a vast range of template choices, an easy-to-use interface, 24-hour support, as well as a 30-day money back guarantee.
InMotion
These guys have been around since 2001 and are arguably the best all-round option out there right now. Their up-time is spectacular, their speeds are top-class, they offer unmatched customer support, and it’s quite easy to use once you get the hang of it. You can check up on them a bit more at collectiveray.com.
In Conclusion At the end of the day, it’s important for all website owners to recognize just how much of a difference hosting nameservers can make to the quality, security, speed, and usability of their websites. It can make all the difference.