Hosting and Domains

What is the difference between hosting and domains? Why do web companies list prices for these separately? What’s a redirect? This blogpost explains all these terms.

Hosting is where the files are stored, the domain name is the unique identifier for your website, and the web address points to where the files are stored.

You could think of hosting as being like your physical house, domain name being like the unique bits of your postal address (house number plus postal code), and the web address being like your full postal address.

🏡 Hosting

Hosting is the storage of the actual files of your website (images, web pages, scripts, and styles). They are stored on a web server. Normally, and by default, servers are locked down to their local users. A web server has to be made publicly available. You can store private and public files on the same server. Web pages are usually located in a folder called public_html.

🪧 Domain name

Your domain name is the unique identifier of your website. For example, the domain name for this website is carnelianwebservices.ca. When you pay for a domain name, you are paying the provider to reserve that identifier for your sole use by registering it with the official domain registry for your country. In Canada, the official domain registry is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA).

When you pay for hosting with the same provider as your domain name, you do not need to mess around with redirects.

✉️ Web address

Your web address (URL) is the full identifier for your website. It is actually a human-readable substitute for your website’s IP address, which is a series of numbers. Your computer also has an IP address which allows internet resources to be routed to your computer. You could think about it like your street address (memorable to humans) and your postal code (useful for machines). The web address for this website is https://www.carnelianwebservices.ca/

Paying for domain and hosting

When you pay a web hosting service to host your website, you are paying for the physical hosting of your files, and for the unique domain name and web address to be reserved for you.

Redirects

A website redirect is similar to when you move house and get your mail redirected.

A redirect can be set up for a variety of reasons. The most obvious one is that your website has moved from one address to another.

Another reason is that you have a free webpage with a different company name in it, such as yourname.blogspot.com or yourname.wordpress.com, and you want to redirect it to yourname.com. The disadvantage of doing this is that the redirect doesn’t always hide the target domain name, which people might find confusing.

My personal website, www.yvonneaburrow.com is actually hosted at yvonne.carnelianwebservices.ca, so the first address redirects to the second. This is not ideal, so at some point, I will pay for hosting for my personal website separately from my business website.

.CA and .COM

A .ca domain indicates that you do business in Canada. According to Web Hosting Canada, 77% of Canadians associate a .ca domain with Canadian business.

A .com domain suggests that your business is global. The .com domain suffix was the first one to be available, so it is the one that most people are familiar with.

Your best bet is to have both .com and .ca domains, for four reasons:

• If someone forgets that you have a .ca domain and types your web address as yourcompany.com, it can be redirected to yourcompany.ca (for example www.carnelianwebservices.com redirects to www.carnelianwebservices.ca).
• You get the benefits of indicating that you do business in Canada and that your website is hosted in Canada;
• You get the instant recognition and trust associated with a .com domain;
• No-one else can register a web address that is very similar to yours but with the .com suffix instead of .ca.