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Is a domain name the same as web hosting?

For those new to affiliate marketing, the questions are many. One that I have heard more than once is this: Are a domain name and web hosting the same thing?

The answer is no, they are not. Confusion can arise because you can buy domains and hosting packages from the same place.

Here is a brief explanation of the differences.

Your domain name is the address of your website, such as myfirstsite.com. You buy it from a domain registrar, which is a company that sells domain names. Some examples are GoDaddy, NameCheap, and 1and1. A domain is unique to you; Two people cannot register the same. However, please note that myfirstsite.com is different than myfirstsite.net or myfirstsite.org.

Domain names are also known as URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) or as the address of your website; various ways of saying basically the same thing.

When you register your domain, that’s all you’re buying; you’re not actually buying space for him and his website to “live”.

This is where the hosting company comes in. Some popular hosting companies are Host Gator, Bluehost, and DreamHost. This is where you rent your server space, a place to put all your website files.

Think of it in another context: Let’s say you have a boat and a snowmobile, but you don’t have space in your garage or driveway. So you rent a storage unit in one of those facilities with rows and rows of doors. Your unit is like your hosting package. The address of the storage facility, so you know where to go to get your stuff, is like your domain name.

This is also a good way to understand the difference between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting. There are many different people who rent storage units in that same building, so it is similar to shared hosting. You share the server with other websites.

Dedicated server hosting is where you rent out the entire server, so it would be like having your own storage building. No one else would be storing their stuff in your building and taking up space. Dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, as you may have guessed.

In either case, you must configure domain name servers to “attach” your domain name to your server. This ensures that when someone types your domain name into a browser, they will know where to find the website files that go with that domain.