Based upon the questions I’ve received from some of my customers, I’ve come to realize that there is some confusion about domain registration and web hosting services. So let’s try to clarify.
Domain registration involves the reserving of a selected domain name for your exclusive use. It’s similar to registering a business name in your state, disallowing all others from using the same business name. Domain names are registered with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
However, we cannot directly interact with ICANN, but rather must work through one of their approved registrars. You can find a list of all approved registrars here:
http://www.internic.net/regist.html
Some of the ‘domains’ that are available include .com, .net, .org, .info, and many others.
The very first domain registrar, back in the old days, was Network Solutions. They’re still around, and they’re still charging more than anyone else (about $35 a year). It’s easy to register a domain name for much cheaper, frequently less than $10 a year. Two of the best are NameCheap and GoDaddy. I’ve done business with both, but am now consolidating all of my domains under my NameCheap account.
In addition to reserving a domain name that we can use for our website, we also need to find space to store all the files that are associated with our website. This is akin to renting office or store space if we were running an ‘offline’, bricks-and-mortar business.
It is the web hosting companies that provide the service of renting to us the space we need to store our website files. In reality, what we’re renting from these companies is file storage space as well as file uploading and downloading.
This file saving and retrieval process is also called ‘bandwidth’, and refers not to the static storage of website files, but the dynamic process of saving, changing, and retrieving files from the web host’s servers. So two of the most important features to key in on when comparing web hosts are Storage and Bandwidth.
There are tens of thousands of web hosting companies from which to choose, but here are my top three recommendations. I’ve done business with all of them, and they’re all excellent:
1. BlueHost
2. HostMonster
3. HostGator
Web hosting is more expensive than domain registration, running generally between $5.00 and $10.00 dollars a month. But compare that price with the cost of renting a physical site for your business, and you can see that running a business online is a huge bargain!
If you have any questions or comments, post them here!
